Meat may get cheaper as El Niño hits

You have a whole bunch of other things. You have El Nino, but we're not going to start there. I'm going to start with: I'm busy selling a car, and the Wee Buy Car guys come out, and I learn that the rep is from Limpopo and his family has a maize farm, but they don't have a maize farm anymore because maize is a good place to hide when you are trying to attack these vulnerable farmers out there. So a lot of the farmers up north.

According to this, like one anecdote, they are flipping to citrus farming, some table grapes as well, because it gives them better visibility over their lands. They're moving away from maize. You've reported a lot in Daily Maverick that maize is one of our primary exports as well. And we're actually doing quite good on that front. But there are all these other types of circumstances that are now forcing farmers to reevaluate sort of crops, what sort of crops that they are growing. Just unpack this.

Is it true? Are farmers in Limpopo flipping to different types of crops? And like, what are the economic circumstances that are forcing those changes? So, Lindsay, I spend a lot of time looking at the farming economy in South Africa and the region. And I mean, of course, then the people that follow our writings in the Daily Maverick, they will see that it's both the economics, the policy, rural issues, land aspect, and they will get to know some of these things over.

Time that we spend our time thinking about. But I think on a point that you are raising, I would say that we have been at a time where the farmers in general have been diversifying what they are doing in South Africa. There are people, of course, that still are mainly focused on particular industries that they are in, but diversification and assessing what works best for each region is something that has been going on for quite some time. But at a macro

Level though, the sector has been doing so well. I mean, you can either go back 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or even in 1994, the dawn of democracy, and you look into agriculture. And I guess this is an important aspect to start on because we have just been in this conversation where people were saying, oh, the farming sector in South Africa is under pressure. Bad things are happening in this country. But if you can look back 1994 to today, this is a sector that has more than doubled in value and in volume terms.