Bread & Wine: When the wheat stops paying (Part Four)

This is the fourth in a six-part series. Read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

Micheil Smuts farms wheat with less ploughing than his father did, and more spraying.

That sounds like a contradiction. On Grasrug, the Swartland farm that’s been in his family for 140 years, the old method was to turn the earth deeply, bury the weeds and plant. Today, Smuts leaves the upper soil less disturbed to reduce erosion and conserve moisture. But the weeds remain on the surface and ryegrass in particular has become increasingly difficult to control.

“We actually spray more now, the less we turn the soil,” he says. Fertilising the crop can also strengthen the weeds competing with it. Conservation farming protects the soil in one way and leans harder on herbicides in another.

As Eugene Moll argued earlier in this series, topsoil is a thin living skin. Smuts’ method helps hold it in place.

It’s the wheatland version of the dilemma retired organic wine farmer Johan Simons described earlier in this series. Simons removed weeds by hand because he would not use herbicide, but the labour cost was punishing.

“It’s cheaper to use poison than people,” he said. Smuts has much larger fields and a commodity crop with even less room in its price for extra labour.

The risks

The agricultural year begins in the second half of April with canola, followed by wheat from early May. The seed needs moisture immediately for strong germination. Fertiliser is applied, then top-dressed in June or July and again around August to lift the wheat’s protein level. Spring growth depends heavily on September rain. Canola is harvested in October, and wheat from late October into November.

At several points, the season can simply come apart. Weeds can overwhelm the crop. Rain can fail at planting. Most dangerously, it can fail after the farmer has already paid for seed, fertiliser, diesel, labour, finance and crop protection.

The machinery is emphatically not rustic. A second-hand tractor and air seeder can cost about R4-million, Smuts says; a larger planting combination can reach R10-million. Then there is the combine harvester.

Once harvested, the wheat goes to a silo and is sold through a broker or marketing company. Smuts is a director of a farmer-owned marketing business started by a group of farmers that included his father, but that does not free him from the market.

South Africa is a net wheat importer, so local prices are tied to international prices. Many farmers must sell to service production loans to a small group of large buyers.

“You are forced to sell,” he says. “You can’t keep your product for longer periods to sell at optimal times.”

Nor, he argues, are local growers adequately rewarded for producing higher-quality wheat. Grain has become simply a commodity, priced against imports from countries including Russia and Poland.

South Africa imported 1.84 million tonnes of wheat in the completed 2024/25 marketing year, almost half the wheat required nationally. Russia supplied 445,668 tonnes, roughly one quarter of those imports. It was second only to Australia.

The competition begins in the field. Smuts says rain-fed Swartland wheat commonly yields about three tonnes a hectare or less. France averaged about 7.4 tonnes a hectare in 2025. European support systems differ, but yield is only half the problem. Most machinery and many inputs used here are imported, while the wheat price is decided elsewhere.

Figures supplied to Grain SA by a Swartland farmer show direct input costs rising about 65% between 2016 and 2026, against a farmgate wheat price increase of about 36%. Smuts puts it more bluntly: machinery prices have doubled in five years while income has not kept pace.

According to the National Agricultural Marketing Council, from 2021 to 2025 fertiliser prices increased by between 38% and 67%, depending on the fertiliser, and diesel costs climbed about 40% to around R20 a litre.

Drought kicks in

Then, in 2026, the rain stopped.

After a wet April and May, the Swartland received about 43mm from June through August, compared with a 10-year average of roughly 202mm. At Grasrug, records extending back to 1968 showed the lowest July rainfall in the series, followed by one of the driest Augusts.

Smuts is cautious about reading climate change directly from one farm’s records. He can usually find an older season that resembles the present one, and says claims that the seasons are shifting are “not that obvious” in his figures.

Grain SA nevertheless warns that production risk is increasing and a monster El Niño is predicted with freakish weather. Whatever the cause of this drought, it has struck an industry with almost no cushion left.

In the northern Swartland, he saw failed crops already being grazed by sheep. Around Porterville, he believed some farmers had lost virtually the whole harvest. Near Moorreesburg the damage was severe and on Grasrug his own wheat was beginning to die. He expected his crop income to fall by at least 30%, with some areas losing 80% or more.

This is the point at which an agricultural problem becomes a human one. The national wheat area planted in 2026 fell to 473,900 hectares, the smallest since 1929. Smuts says some farmers struggled to finance even this crop after an average but unprofitable previous season. After the present losses, he cannot see how many of them will plant again.

Canola offers better returns and now occupies more of the farm, but it’s no rescue crop. To limit blackleg disease it should be planted to the same field only once in three years, and there are very few large buyers. Although there’s still more room for canola, if too many hectares shift in that direction there’s a possibility the market will simply be flooded.

Can a wheat farmer survive on grain alone?

“No, not currently,” Smuts says.

He is unusually well placed to say it. Instead of using every good year to buy more land, he invested beyond the farm and is financially secure. Even so, 2026 will be his third consecutive season losing millions on farming. Others who expanded to gain economies of scale made a rational choice, he says, but many now carry much greater debt.

“It is a disaster,” he says. “A massive disaster.”

Smuts still likes farming. He has no children to inherit Grasrug, but the generations remain present. His grandfather knew a largely fenceless landscape of small wheat fields, pigs and hand harvesting. His father built the marketing company. Smuts continues because the farm gives shape to his life.

“It’s a legacy thing,” he says. “I farm basically to honour my dad. It’s a purpose.”

He will find a way to keep Grasrug going. What he cannot see, if prices, costs and climate risk remain as they are, is a viable future for the crop that has grown there for generations. DM

Tomorrow: The chemical wake of bread and wine