AGRICULTURAL SECTOR: SA farmers swap maize for sunflower as ‘Godzilla’ El Niño threatens harvests

South Africa’s commercial grain farmers intend to plant significantly less maize this season than last year as the unfolding El Niño, surging fertiliser and fuel costs and low prices create a perfect storm of uncertainty across the platteland.

South Africa currently has ample carryover maize stocks – a record 4.3 million tonnes of the white variety – in the wake of last season’s stout harvest. But if this summer’s harvest is much smaller because of less planting and drought, it could potentially herald tight supplies next year and accelerating food inflation.

The official Crop Estimates Committee (CEC) released its first projections on Tuesday for the intentions of producers to plant summer crops, and it was a sobering look at how farmers are preparing for the “Godzilla” El Niño.

Based on its surveys, it showed that at this early stage of the game, farmers intend to devote 12.37% less land this season than they did last year for maize plantings – dropping to 2.387 million hectares, down from 2.724 million hectares in 2026, and the lowest in eight years.

For the staple white maize, the picture is even more worrying – a drop of more than 18% in the amount of land that will be devoted to the crop that is the main source of calories for lower-income households.

This is partly a function of soaring input costs and drought concerns, but also speaks to depressed prices for the commodity.

“If you go back a season or two, farmers had very good prices for white maize,” said Tobias Doyer, the CEO of industry group Grain SA. “But internationally, maize prices have been dropping for a while. South Africa dodged that bullet when southern Africa had a drought a couple of years ago, and our white maize prices remained higher than they should have been.

“And that gave farmers the signal to plant white maize and continue planting white maize. And now the biggest part of the surpluses that we currently have in silos all over the country is white maize.”

The drop in the amount of land intended for planting key summer crops has fallen across the board, adding up to a 2.0% decrease.

The outlier is the amount of land that farmers have signalled they plan to devote to sunflower seed. That has soared by almost 45% because of a range of factors including higher prices, lower input costs, and the fact that the crop is less vulnerable to drought with the benefit of a shorter growing season.

Revealingly, Grain SA has noted an exceptionally early start to sunflower seed plantings in the western production areas of the summer grain crop – in some cases two months earlier in August, in part to take advantage of good soil moisture levels while they last.

Modern planting decisions are far from arbitrary: decades of technological breakthroughs, including GMOs and GPS-driven precision farming, allow farmers to tailor inputs based on exact soil conditions.

The current El Niño, which formed in June, is widely regarded by climate scientists to be the most intense on record – possibly a once-in-a-millennium event – and it is not predicted to fade before February or March at the earliest – near the end of South Africa’s summer crop season.

El Niño typically heralds drought in this region, and while this is not always the case, October has mostly been hot and dry over large parts of the summer grain belt after deceptive rains in September.

Anecdotal reports from farmers suggest this fits the pattern of previous El Niño events – a wet September preceding a summer of drought and heatwaves.

Doyer elaborated on how these historic trends influence the way farmers are approaching this season of extreme uncertainty.

“With El Niño, you are probably going to get lots of rain in the beginning, lots of rain at the end, with drought in the middle. But all things considered, it’s going to be a shorter season, and you want a crop that gets to maturity faster than other crops, and that’s also a motivation for switching to sunflowers,” said Doyer.

The South African Weather Service forecasts that the far northeast, which includes the Kruger National Park, will likely be the hardest-hit region in South Africa, but the summer grain belt is also seen getting baked in a scorcher of a summer.

And the wider region where much agricultural production remains subsistence and rain-fed could experience chronic food shortages, leaving tens of millions in need of assistance at a time when aid budgets have been gutted.

It is still early days, with things changing week by week. The onset of hot weather and the sudden dearth of rain in October has slowed the initial early planting binge as farmers wait to see when the heavens will open again.

“We are optimistic that most farmers will continue to plant early in the season, taking advantage of the soil moisture, although the heatwave is quickly raising our concerns,” Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist at the Agricultural Business Chamber, pointedly noted in a comment on the CEC data.

The full picture will only come into clear focus in January when the CEC releases its preliminary estimates on the amount of land that was actually planted – which could differ significantly from the amount that farmers have signalled they intend to plant.

The bottom line is that it is planting time and South African commercial farmers have indicated that they are going to plant less maize this season and a lot more sunflower. The consequences of that decision will only be clear a few months hence. DM