This is according to Dawie Maree, Head of Information and Marketing at FNB. Maree's comments come after the National Crop Estimates Committee released data relating to South Africa’s farmers' intentions to plant summer crops for the 2021/22 production year. This update showed that farmers intend to plant almost 5% more hectares of summer crops, which translates to an expected total summer crop planted area of 4.34 million hectares, with the biggest increases of 11.81%, 14.48%, and 16.32% year-on-year for soybeans, dry beans, and sunflower, respectively. Maree further adds that despite increases in fuel and fertilizer prices, early indications are that South Africa will have another fantastic agriculture season in the year ahead.

The Milk Producers Organisation (MPO) had recently gone through a restructuring process which resulted in the MPO decreasing its workforce by about 60%. According to Denene Erasmus, editor of Farmer's Weekly, in May this year, the MPO’s board of directors embarked on what they called a strategic and structural reform process in the organisation. She says part of this process included the suspension of the then CEO, Chris van Dyk.

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Emerging farmers and entrepreneurs in agri-processing only have a few days left to enter Eskom's 2021 Business Investment Competition. The competition closes at midnight on Sunday 31 October. Cecil Ramonotsi, CEO of Eskom's Development Foundation, says this year’s competition aims to help emerging farmers commercialise and formalise their businesses. This, as many of the emerging farmers across South Africa are based in rural areas where formal business management education is lacking.

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