“Our crops are dying,” warns an award-winning Northern Cape farmer, Gerhard Bruwer, amid nationwide outrage over Eskom’s ongoing power cuts. “They are dying in front of our eyes. Potatoes, corn, peanuts, everything is dying.”
Bruwer, of the Douglas-based Genadeshoop Boerdery, was among the producers, farmworkers, and frustrated residents from Douglas, Prieska, and Hopetown who took to the streets on Friday to raise awareness of the devastating impact of load shedding. The protest culminated at GWK’s offices in Douglas with many farmers arriving in tractors.
The former Toyota and Agri SA Young Farmer of the Year winner farms alongside his father in an irrigation area. For them, load shedding has become a nightmare, he says. “To irrigate, we have electricity for 14 hours of the day. For the [remaining] 10 hours, everything stands still because [there’s no] electricity.”
He emphasises that without proper irrigation, high temperatures experienced in the region over the past few weeks, made matters worse.
Bruwer says farmers have made recommendations to Eskom in a desperate attempt to safeguard food production.
“We suggested that, for example, when it’s load shedding level 4, they instead give [farming areas] level 2 [during the growing season]. From May to July, they can give us level 4 and the rest of the country level 2 because by then we [only need to] harvest.”
According to Bruwer, they have not heard back from the crumbling power utility.
Eskom meets with Agri SA, Grain SA
Earlier this week, Agri SA and Grain SA met with Eskom chief operations officer Jan Oberholzer to discuss the impact of power cuts on farmers and also proposed several recommendations.
Oberholzer confirmed that load shedding would be a reality for the unforeseeable future. Stage 4 will be implemented more frequently as a result of unforeseen breakages at various plants and planned maintenance work, according to a media release issued by Agri SA and Grain SA.
To this effect, Agri SA also recommended a “trade-off on load shedding schedules.” It says, “Farmers in certain areas are willing to take higher stages of load shedding during the months of April, May, an June 2023 on condition that there is sufficient electricity available in the critical irrigation months between January and April 2023.”
Agri SA also proposed an alternative tariff structure to the current Ruraflex tariff to ensure that farmers are not unfairly burdened with paying higher electricity tariffs when irrigating during peak times.
“Currently, the winter peak tariff is costing R4 per unit more due to the penalty factor that is incorporated in the tariff,” explains Agri SA.
It also suggests allowing more off-grid and grid renewable electricity generation systems to feed surplus energy back into Eskom’s grid. This, however, must be accompanied with provisions to finalise buy-back tariffs, the farmers’ organisation emphasises.
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