Barley Gains Ground In The Swartland

The availability of improved varieties, mandate contracts and storage infrastructure promise to turn barley into a lucrative option in the Swartland. Gert Claassen, who five years ago started producing barley on a commercial scale, spoke to Glenneis Kriel about this opportunity.

- Glenneis Kriel

In 2013, when Gert Claassen and his father Koot exchanged the fertile maize lands of Delmas in Mpumalanga for the wheat lands near Malmesbury in the Western Cape, they were looking for ways to combine quality of life with the opportunities that the beautiful Swartland held.

“Because the Swartland is such a stable wheat- and sheep-producing region, wheat rotations here have traditionally been limited to medics and canola. Coming from the Highveld, I struggled with the idea of planting only one main crop, so I started working on alternatives,” recalls Claassen.

One such alternative was barley, but past attempts to establish it as a commercial crop in the Swartland had been unsuccessful, according to Claassen. This was because Clipper, the only variety planted at that time, was ill-suited to the region’s climatic conditions and production practices.

His search led him to a malting barley trial programme in the Swartland aimed at establishing a new high-fermentation variety, S5. A handful of farmers were participating in the programme, which had been running for three years by the time Claassen joined. However, the trial was halted after the fourth year.

“I’m not too sure why, because I was very satisfied with the results. The yields were good, and nitrogen levels, always one of the biggest quality constraints in the Swartland, were acceptable for normal malting grade,” he says.

A NEW ERA

In 2014 and 2015, in the absence of regional contracts, Claassen supplied SAB Miller (later to merge with AB InBev) under a contract with Unigrain in the Southern Cape. He produced S9 (Agulhas) and S12 (Hessekwa) barley varieties on 800ha.