The practical steps advocated to build drought resilience make sense in theory but come at a cost many smaller farmers cannot afford, an audience member at Farmer's Weekly's panel discussion on El Niño preparedness said. Fanie Botha, a cattle and irrigation grain farmer from Luckhoff on the Free State–Northern Cape border, said in an interview that irrigation farmers had been through tough years and that smaller producers often cannot adopt the conservation agriculture and soil-organic-matter measures advisers and financiers recommend.

'Your equipment doesn't work for free, nor do your pivots or your staff. Everything that you use has become more expensive — electricity, fertiliser, diesel — but your income has not gone up,' Botha said. Irrigation farmers grow cash crops, and the inputs and products offered to farm with fewer inputs all cost money: 'You cannot have such high input costs that you end up not making a profit … how do you do that at a negative maize price, a negative wheat price and at the price of new equipment and fertiliser?'

Margins in maize and wheat have become so thin that smaller farmers cannot replace equipment: a combine harvester that cost R2 million twelve years ago now costs more than R5 million, land has become too expensive to expand, and 'smaller farmers just survive; they're no longer going forward'. Planting to cover existing costs still beats not planting, he said, 'but you know for a fact you're going backwards'.

Prices compound the squeeze. A month earlier the farmer's price for yellow maize was R2,900 a tonne; it is now R3,800, and many farmers had to sell at the low price. At planting the price of urea shot up from R8,000 to R16,000 a tonne, other fertilisers rose by up to R6,000 a tonne and diesel rocketed while grain prices fell. Experts say to market when the price is right, 'but many farmers have to sell in order to pay someone'.

'On paper it is easy to become a millionaire, but in reality it is not that easy,' Botha said. 'With these high input costs and low prices, farmers are slowly suffocating. And the reality is: no farmers, no food.'

Source: Farmers Weekly South Africa