Even though the rainfall is welcomed in other provinces, especially by farmers located in dry areas in the North West and Northern Cape, farmers in the Free State have been hit hard. Jack Armour, Commercial Manager of Free State Agriculture, shares that rainfall of between 50mm to 100mm has been recorded in the mentioned areas on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the South African Weather Service says La Niña conditions, which is the reason for the continuous rainfall in South Africa, are expected to continue during the summer season. The weather service says the predictions for rainfall over the larger part of the country are for enhanced probabilities of above-normal rainfall during the January-February-March, February-March-April, and March-April-May 2022 seasons. This was echoed by Johan van den Berg, an independent agricultural meteorologist, who warned that farmers should be on the lookout for animal diseases and those living along river banks should move their farm equipment and animals to higher-lying areas.

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The agriculture organisation Saai welcomes the national Department of Agriculture’s decision to suspend the Presidential Employment Stimulus aid packages. This comes after the department made the announcement on 13 January that it is suspending the vouchers with immediate effect until further notice. The vouchers were initiated to address the high rate of unemployment during the Covid-19 pandemic whilst also seeking to sustain self-employment for subsistence farmers. The organisation's Dr Theo de Jager says that some farmers never got started because the long-awaited coupons never reached them. He says only about 55 000 of the two million subsistence farmers have benefited to some degree.

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