Farming stats: the numbers don’t add up

There is a long-standing debate about the real number of commercial farms in South Africa, largely caused by the way official statistics on farm numbers are gathered. The last comprehensive agricultural census was done in 1993, while the agricultural censuses in 2007 and 2017 used only the farm businesses on the Statistics South Africa business register as the sample frame. The agricultural survey by Statistics South Africa in the intervening years also relied only on the business register as the basis for the survey.

The data illustrates that we do not have a comprehensive picture of the size and structure of South African commercial agriculture. The latest agricultural censuses were restricted to farm businesses registered to pay VAT, despite pleas from academia for a comprehensive census, largely because of a lack of funding. In essence, we do not know anything about the tens of thousands of farm business that have a turnover of less than R1-million.

Building a picture

We expanded the findings from the censuses with numbers from the 2011 Population Census and the 2016 Community Survey.

Data from the 2011 Population Census shows that 2 879 638 households out of South Africa’s total population, or 19.9 per cent of all households, are active in agriculture. The census report on agricultural households established that only 2 per cent of these households reported an annual income derived from agriculture above R307 000. This translates into 57 592 households that can be considered as commercial farmers, with agriculture as the main or only source of household income.

This refutes the common belief that the number of commercial farms in South Africa is declining. There are also another 349 000 households with agricultural income between R38 000 and R307 000, probably part-time farmers with this income serving as an additional revenue source.

The 2017 Agricultural Census report shows that 40 122 commercial farmers, almost all small family-based operations, produce more than 80 per cent of the total value of agricultural output.

Small-scale giants

One can therefore assume that around 214 800 farming households (black and white) who practise some form of commercial farming were excluded from the Agricultural Census.

Commercial farming in South Africa therefore consists largely of small-scale family-based operations with almost 90 per cent of all VAT-registered commercial farming businesses classified as micro- or small-scale enterprises, responsible for only 23 per cent of total farm income but 37 per cent of all farm employment.

The 2 610 large farms (with a turnover on average above R22.5-million per annum) were responsible for 67 per cent of farm income and employed more than half the agricultural labour force of 757 000 farm workers in 2017.

The facts presented here should enable more nuanced interpretation of South Africa’s farm structure. Not all white commercial farm operations are “large-scale” and not all black farmers are “small-scale”, “subsistence” or “emerging”, and most farm operations can be classified as micro or small in scale.

As Table 2 shows, there are 242 221 commercial farming households in South Africa, of which only 43 891 (18 per cent) are white commercial farmers.

If we consider only the agricultural households with agriculture as their main source of income surveyed in the 2016 Community Survey, we end up with a total of 132 700 households, of whom 93 000 (70 per cent) are black farmers.

Clearly our official data misses a lot of information on the many farmers outside the VAT-paying farmers. How we are able to make policies and design programmes for these farmers when they are not even counted in the sector remains a mystery.