Fund aims to boost regenerative agriculture

Switching from conventional to regenerative agriculture may be necessary, but it’s costly. Nic van Schalkwyk, executive director of Restore Africa Funds, spoke to Glenneis Kriel, about his organisation’s solution to this.

- Glenneis Kriel

Why do producers have to change the way they farm? 

Our world is in peril. Economies and societies globally are becoming more fragmented and disconnected, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine revealing just how broken these systems have become.

We’re seeing increased antagonism between the US and China as power shifts from the west to the east, Brexit deepening the divide between the UK and EU, civil wars taking their toll in places like Afghanistan, Syria and South Sudan, and many domestic political challenges, not only in South Africa, but internationally. Lawlessness from both the elite and the populist movements are on the rise.

Besides these man-made disasters, we also have natural disasters, such as droughts and floods, which are predicted to increase because of climate change.

The World Economic Forum publishes an annual global risk report. This year, six of its top 10 longterm risks were directly environmental, with only one, cybercrime at number 8, not having any environmental link. We are hacking the world apart, and the problem is that there is no Planet B.

Farmers are the principal custodians and users of land and water. As such, they have a major impact on food security as well as the health of the environment. However, environmental degradation, the huge escalation in input costs, geopolitics, and adverse climatic conditions have rendered the conventional model of farming, where farmers add more and more chemicals and machinery to grow crops, unsustainable.

Over the past 15 years, for example, the number of dairy farmers in South Africa has decreased from 4 000 to fewer than 1 000.