The impact of load shedding on the agricultural sector reaches far beyond farm-level profitability. According to Anton Rabe, executive director of Hortgro, the country’s power cuts are also threatening the development of up-and-coming farmers, and projects geared towards deciduous farmer development and transformation.
Hortgro is the South African deciduous fruit industry’s knowledge partner and representative body of deciduous fruit farmers in the country.
During an exclusive interview with Food For Mzansi, Rabe pointed out several concerns about the government’s approach to addressing load shedding. “We are concerned that government seems to not fully understand what the impact is on a grass-roots scale.”
Rabe unpacks how load shedding has forced deciduous fruit farmers to spend millions of Rands to run irrigation cycles on their farms, impacts on the export market, and industry development.
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Anton Rabe: This is yet another risk factor. It affects the viability and profitability at the farm level, so any new ventures, projects or programmes will be very difficult to start up in this environment.
As an industry, we’ve agreed to rather focus the next few years on supporting farmers that are already in the system and see how we can ensure that they do not go bust. This is instead of growing the percentage of our emerging growers and graduating them into the commercial mainstream to create space for new entrants.
What’s the cost of load shedding to deciduous farms in Mzansi?
Load shedding in itself is a challenge. At the stage 6 level, it is absolutely not viable to farm and irrigation schedules are disrupted. We foresee that this will have an impact on fruit size, the quality of produce, and of course the impact on the packing and cooling environment.
You can manage up to a certain point with generators and solar. My information is that it is still possible up to stage 3, but beyond that, it becomes impossible and very costly.
It is costing farmers four to five times more than the normal electricity supply. It does have a direct impact from a cost structure and the logistics side of things.
What does stage 6 load shedding mean for farmers?
In practice, that means that eight out of 24 hours there is no electricity. What we’ve also experienced is that the phase of the current is choked – one grower explained that after the power was switched back on, the electric motor of their irrigation system did not want to start because the load was 190 Volt and not 220. So if the motor is running, it can continue running at 190, but it cannot start up at 190.
We are running into our harvesting season and irrigation runs 24/7, and if a schedule is disrupted normally the computer does not start where it stopped two hours ago. It goes to the next orchard block, so it could be that an orchard is missed in an irrigation cycle, and in some cases missed again when the next cycle comes, due to load shedding.
It’s a double whammy, and during stage 6 load shedding there is not enough time to properly irrigate the total farm.
The impact unfortunately does not stop there…
Yes, the other complicating matter is our special markets, which require cold sterilisation of produce at a certain temperature, for a certain number of days in order to comply with the export market protocol.
There are quite a number of them: China, the US, Taiwan, and other Far East markets.
It’s impossible to comply with temperature requirements when there’s a cut in power supply, which is why farmers use generators. But this is also a costly exercise. One grower told us that on a 24-hour equivalent of using generators, it is costing them R1 million every 24 hours.
What does this mean for farmworkers?
Load shedding is already increasing the capital investment and production costs on farms, now there are also talks around the minimum wage. As an industry, we understand that workers are under pressure, and the cost of living has gone up. But we cannot afford a minimum wage adjustment of more than the CPI.
With an industry that is already under stress, we just can’t take any further shocks. And obviously, emerging growers are at higher risk than the long-established growers that might not have the loans of capital to repay.
We are concerned that government seems to not fully understand what the impact is on a grass-roots scale.
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