organic farming in south africa

⏱ 5 min read · 871 words

Most writing on organic farming repeats the same few tips whatever country it is aimed at: compost, neem oil, companion planting. South Africa has something more specific. Particular communities in particular regions developed their own technical knowledge, and South African researchers are now writing it down instead of leaving it to word of mouth alone. This is what it looks like.

Seasons and seed

Reading the sky instead of a calendar

Long before printed planting calendars, farming communities in southern Africa timed the season by the Pleiades rising before dawn. The cluster was known as the digging stars, and seeing it meant it was time to start hoeing the ground.2 The Xhosa and Zulu name, isiLimela, means “month of Pleiades”. Once the cluster showed in the early morning sky around June, farmers knew planting had to begin so the crops would be ready by summer.1

Xhosa men counted their years of manhood from the June sighting of isiLimela. The farming calendar and the social calendar were the same event.

Protecting the crop before harvest

In KwaZulu-Natal, farmers produced their own sorghum seed by covering the tender seed heads of chosen stalks with grass until harvest, to keep the birds off. This is seed saving done in the field rather than in storage. The protection happens while the grain is still forming on the stalk.3

Soil and water

Termite mounds as a fertility gauge

Farmers don’t avoid termite mounds. They read them. Cash-strapped smallholders across parts of Southern Africa judge a mound’s fertility by the vegetation growing on it. A well-covered mound is dug up and spread on the fields in place of bought NPK fertiliser, and a bare mound is left alone.4

Science backs the practice. A South African study of sugarcane on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast and Midlands found that termite-mound soil had noticeably more clay, total carbon, calcium, magnesium, zinc and nitrogen than the soil around it.5

Women’s knowledge of where to find water

In the Northern Cape and Eastern Cape, women hold and apply knowledge of plant species that point to underground water, which they then use to supply their households.8 It is practical ecological knowledge, held by women, and it rarely turns up in general farming literature.

Pests, livestock and weather

A ranked, documented pest-plant toolkit

Instead of the usual advice about marigolds and basil, South African ethnobotanical surveys have ranked the plants local farmers actually rely on. In Madibeng, North West Province, researchers identified ten plant species from seven families used to manage crop pests and disease. Allium dregeanum was the most frequently reported, followed by Tulbaghia violacea, known outside farming circles as wild garlic.6

Deworming goats without a vet

The knowledge isn’t limited to crops. In Jozini Municipality, KwaZulu-Natal, researchers interviewed indigenous-knowledge experts and recorded thirty-three plant species used to control worm burdens in goats. Cissus quadrangularis was the most widely used, named by 67% of the experts surveyed.7 This veterinary knowledge matters to farmers who can’t easily reach or afford commercial dewormers.

Animals as a drought warning

Communal farmers in the O.R. Tambo district, Eastern Cape, treat coordinated wildlife behaviour as an early warning of drought. Researchers recorded knowledge built around locusts, snakes, cobras, butterflies and bees travelling in the same direction, along with frogs calling and horses playing, all read as signs that dry weather is coming. The researchers noted that this knowledge had been almost entirely undocumented before their study.3

Keeping it alive

Every study cited here raises the same concern: this knowledge lives almost entirely in oral tradition. Researchers looking at women’s agricultural knowledge found that its use is declining as younger generations move toward formal training, and that it is often lost outright when knowledgeable elders die.8 Recording it with proper citations, instead of repeating it as generic “traditional wisdom”, is a small part of keeping it alive.

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