The barley harvest for 2013 is underway around South Africa! The SAB Maltings and Agricultural Services team have been working hard at harvesting this year’s yield.
In the dry land areas
In the dry land area 378 producers planted 66 933 hectares of malted barley this year. Farmers have already started to harvest this season’s dry land barley, with harvesting expected to continue until just before Christmas. In the Swellendam and Heidelberg areas around 42 000 tons of malting barley have already been delivered to the silos. Although rainy weather in the Bredasdorp/ Caledon area slowed harvesting down a bit farmers from this part of the Overberg have already delivered 12 000 tons.
Irrigation areas
Harvesting has also started in the Loskop, Koedoeskop and Atlanta irrigation areas where we are trialling barley for possible expansion to deliver locally grown malted barley to the new Alrode Maltings plant. This trial is scheduled to start production in 2015. Harvesting in the irrigation areas of Vaalharts, Taung, Douglas, Jacobsdal and Barkly West will start in the first week of November until middle December.
In the irrigation areas around 250 farmers produce barley on 8 400 hectares of which approximately 1 000 hectares are planted by small scale and emerging farmers. The SAB Maltings team expects to add between 6 000 and 7 000 tons of barley from these small scale and emerging farmers to this year’s local production.
This year’s irrigation barley harvest will also include the yield of Raggie Sibly and Norman Cornellissen, two Jacobsdal farmers who are harvesting their first barley crop. They are part of SAB’s Go-Farming initiative, which is working to support emerging farmers.
SAB’s goal over the next five to eight years is to get emerging and small-scale farmers to a point where they are supplying SAB with 31 000 tonnes of the company’s barley requirements annually.
We wish our Maltings and Agricultural Services teams the best of luck with the remainder of the harvest!
