Growing Daisies For Seed

31 YEARS AGO One of South Africa’s favourite wild veld flowers, the Namaqualand daisy, can be a valuable alternative winter crop for smallholders and farmers if the flowers are used for seed production.

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While daisy seed production can be profitable, it’s not easy money. For a start, the seed market is notoriously easily upset by overproduction. And harvesting daisy seed is extremely labour-intensive, requiring a stable and dependable source of unskilled manpower.

With total production costs at around R6 000/ha [about R49 400/ha], it definitely is not a low-cost operation either. But the potential benefits are great, says Dion Lottering of Lindley farm on the Crocodile River. From 2,6ha planted to Namaqualand daisies (Dimorphotheca sinuata), he harvested some 800kg of seed when the season ended.

Lottering, farm manager for Rodney Zingel of Mayford Seed Company, established the daisies on several small and odd blocks of land planted to tomatoes, pumpkins, petunias and grain sorghum the previous season.