We generally talk about animal health in South Africa because of frequent outbreaks of animal diseases, such as foot-and-mouth disease in cattle and African swine fever in pigs, among others.
But plant health is as essential, and we will need to invest more in it from now on.
News from Malawi reminds me of this, as the downy mildew outbreak threatens some of their maize fields.
I hope they can quickly control its spread. Malawi has faced challenging conditions recently due to poor weather, resulting in lower crop yields and food insecurity.
A case in point was 2024, when Malawi’s maize harvest fell by 17% to 2.9-million tonnes, well below the annual needs of 3.5-million tonnes.
At such times, there was also strong participation from the World Food Programme, which jumped in to help.
We no longer have the luxury, as the US administration has limited funding for USAID, which was one of the World Food Programme’s major funders.
Therefore, ensuring crop protection in Malawi falls to the government, organised agriculture, and farmers.
They will need to act quickly so the country can maintain a comfortable maize harvest in 2026.
Agricultural activity promising
Meanwhile, we had the second-largest maize harvest on record in South Africa in the 2024-2025 season, at about 16.44-million tonnes, up 28% year-on-year, driven by favourable rains.
In terms of crop farming, KwaZulu-Natal, like the rest of South Africa, received excessive rainfall across various regions.
Still, farmers have managed to plant, and the crops look promising across multiple areas, mainly maize, soybeans, and sugarcane. Of course, the horticulture fields look wonderful as well.
In the households we saw across the various villages, people’s gardens looked fantastic, and it appears the rains have been broadly beneficial.
Of course, we will have a clearer sense of the area farmers planted to summer grains and oilseeds for the 2025-2026 season in February 2026, when the Crop Estimates Committee releases the data.
But based on what we continue to observe as we drive around during this summer holiday period, the agricultural activity looks promising.
Late plantings
These La Niña rains have delayed plantings in other regions of the country.
Still, I generally remain hopeful that farmers will continue to use the windows of warm weather to advance plantings in areas that haven’t yet planted.
We have until mid-January 2026 to push planting.
Indeed, January is not an ideal time, and it is later than usual. But we have had late plantings before and still managed to obtain a good crop.
In fact, the very excellent harvest of the 2024-2025 season in maize and soybeans that I mentioned above was roughly a month and a half behind its typical schedule.
Therefore, I am not concerned for now and remain upbeat that we could still have a better harvest in the 2025-26 season.
What I saw in the various regions of KZN gives some comfort. However, the cattle industry urgently needs vaccination.
