Grain SA warns Swartland wheat crop and SA’s food security at risk, pushes for urgent affordable crop insurance.
Grain SA has raised serious concern over deteriorating conditions in the Swartland, where grain producers are facing another extremely difficult production season and some farmers estimate that 25% to 30% of their crop potential may already have been lost, on top of a hectarage decrease.
Follow-up rain is urgently needed. But the situation exposes a much bigger problem: South African grain producers are increasingly being expected to carry climate and production risk that has become economically impossible to absorb alone.
“The Swartland’s farmers are in trouble. This is not simply about one dry spell or one difficult season. Margins have been eroded over several years, production risks are increasing and producers have very little financial buffer left when the rain does not come,” says Grain SA CEO, Dr Tobias Doyer.
A season that changed dramatically
The Swartland entered the 2026 production season with encouraging rainfall. Regional data supplied by Overberg Agri shows approximately 176 mm of rain during April and May, compared with a ten-year average of around 66 mm.
Farmers therefore planted, applied fertiliser and committed significant production expenditure, despite economic production pressure.
Conditions then changed dramatically.
From June to August, only an approximate 43 mm of rain was recorded against a ten-year average of around 202 mm – almost 79% below average.
For a dryland producer, rainfall totals alone do not tell the full story. The timing and distribution of rainfall determine whether a crop can reach its potential. By the time conditions deteriorate, much of the cost of producing that crop has already been incurred.
Seed cannot be unplanted. Fertiliser cannot be taken back. Diesel, labour, finance and crop-protection costs have already been committed.
Farmers have less room to absorb the loss
At the same time, the financial margin available to carry this risk is shrinking.
Farm-level figures supplied by a Swartland producer illustrate that between 2016 and 2026, direct input costs increased by approximately 65%, while the estimated farm-gate wheat price increased by only around 36%.
These figures do not fully account for the sharp increases in machinery replacement, maintenance, labour, finance and the cost of capital.
Producers have responded by becoming more efficient. They have adopted conservation agriculture, improved soil health and water-use efficiency, invested in better genetics and continuously sought higher yields.
Producers, through SACTA, contributed approximately R986 million directed towards breeding and technology, resulting in the release of 231 new varieties, including 66 wheat varieties.
But there is a limit to what better farming can achieve. Farmers can manage water better. They cannot manufacture rain.
Government cannot leave producers to carry this risk alone
Grain SA believes affordable and meaningful crop insurance must now become a national agricultural priority.
South Africa has agricultural insurance products, but meaningful multi-peril or yield-based cover remains unaffordable or inaccessible to many dryland producers operating on extremely tight margins.
Weather-related index insurance has already been enabled in South Africa and advances in weather stations, satellite information, soil-moisture monitoring and other data make increasingly sophisticated risk products possible.
What is lacking is the scale and public-private support required to make these mechanisms affordable.
“Government cannot continue to regard climate risk as the farmer’s problem alone,” Doyer says.
“When a producer fails, South Africa does not simply lose that individual business. We lose production capacity, employment, skills, infrastructure and ultimately a greater degree of our food-security resilience.”
Internationally, many major agricultural producers operate within systems where governments share agricultural production risk through subsidised crop-insurance premiums, disaster programmes or other risk-management mechanisms.
Grain SA is not calling for farmers to be protected from normal business risk or guaranteed a profit.
It is calling for a realistic partnership between government, producers, insurers and the agricultural value chain to ensure that exceptional climate risk does not systematically drive otherwise viable producers out of production.
South Africa cannot afford to keep losing wheat producers
The warning comes at a time when the area planted to wheat in South Africa is already at its lowest level in 97 years. The concern is therefore greater than the size of the 2026 Swartland crop.
Repeated losses force farmers to reconsider where they allocate land and capital. In the Swartland, producers may increasingly move land away from wheat and towards livestock or other enterprises offering a more sustainable balance between risk and return.
Once producers, machinery, infrastructure and expertise leave wheat production, they cannot simply be switched back on when South Africa needs them.
The consequences extend far beyond the farm gate.
Research by BFAP estimates that South Africa’s wheat value chain contributes approximately R70 billion to R75 billion to the economy and supports around 90 000 jobs, while wheat-based products are consumed by approximately 96% of South African households.
Grain SA calls for urgent action
Grain SA believes government and industry must urgently develop a coordinated response that includes:
- affordable index-based and multi-peril crop insurance for dryland producers;
- a public-private mechanism to support crop-insurance premiums at sufficient scale;
- greater use of regional rainfall, satellite, soil-moisture and weather-station data to develop credible insurance products;
- a responsive wheat tariff and regulatory environment that recognises the realities facing domestic producers;
- continued investment in breeding, genetics and agronomic research; and
- market mechanisms that provide effective price discovery and properly recognise locality and quality.
“The question South Africa needs to answer is simple: Do we consider domestic wheat production as strategically important, and what are we prepared to do to keep local producers in business?” asks Doyer.
“South African wheat farmers are not asking to farm without risk. But they cannot be expected to carry an ever-growing combination of climate, production and market risk alone.
If we wait until producers have already left the industry, rebuilding that production capacity will be far more difficult and far more expensive than protecting it now.”
