How intercropping added value to this Free State farm

The main goal of intercropping is to achieve the highest possible yield on a particular piece of land by using the available resources to their full potential. And that is precisely the route that father-and-son team Francis and Mike Mandy took on their crop and cattle farm in Harrismith. Annelie Coleman reports.

- Annelie Coleman

Regenerative agriculture and intercropping aren't new concepts. According to a research report published in Plants, People, Planet, agronomists in Europe and North America have been working on intercropping since the 1890s. During the interwar period and into the 1950s, the practice attracted considerable attention from colonial agronomists.

However, although this early work entered the public domain during the 1970s, few agroecologists noticed it. There are various reasons why some agroecologists of that era might have known about earlier work on intercropping but chose to ignore it, but more likely most members of that generation were simply unaware of it.

Over the past 50 years, the practice of intercropping (planting a mixture of several different crops on the same field) has drawn increasing attention in crop science. Given its high yields and low requirements for fertiliser and pesticides, it offers considerable advantages over conventional 'industrial' agriculture.

"Nevertheless, although research on intercropping has been conducted since the late 19th century, that work became largely invisible after 1945 as the rapid rise of industrial agriculture erased alternative approaches from view. Since the 1970s, however, intercropping and other alternatives have reappeared on the research agenda, as the damaging impacts of industrial agriculture have become evident," the report reads.

IT MAKES FINANCIAL SENSE

According to Mike Mandy of Mandy Farming in Harrismith, Free State, intercropping indubitably makes financial and economic sense. "When you sit with your bank manager or accountant and he or she tells you to plant more hectares to achieve economy of scale, it comes as quite a shock, as it means borrowing more money and requires more equipment.