Second Crop of Organic Cotton Harvested in South Africa

South Africa’s second commercial-scale certified organic cotton crop has just been harvested at three commercial farmer field trial sites in Limpopo and one in the Marble Hall area in Mpumalanga. Eleven small-scale farmers in the Nonakeng area also participated in the field trials this year. This second harvest of organically grown cotton in South Africa puts us a step closer to our goal. By creating new markets for organic cotton and transferring new farming knowledge and skills, the production of organic cotton in South Africa is a means of effecting sustainable farming practices and significantly enhancing the livelihoods of farmers, their families and communities.

From a cotton-growing perspective, the season has not been an ideal one weather-wise, with very high rainfall in the Limpopo region and cooler than expected summer temperatures. This has led to almost one-third of the cotton hectares being lost from the proposed production area. The season has also seen a high incidence of one particular later season cotton pest – the leaf hopper or jassid – which has caused substantial damage to the crop in the form of premature cotton boll burst. This pest has proved particularly hard to control using organic methods. The high incidence of jassids this year has been attributed to the higher rainfall and is also affecting the conventional cotton in South Africa.

Notwithstanding the challenges, it is estimated that a crop of between 1.5 tonnes and 2 tonnes per hectare would be achieved – very similar to the yields produced during the year one trials. Woolworths, the world’s third largest consumer of organic cotton (after international giants Wal-Mart and Nike), is again buying all the organic cotton fibre produced. ComMark, Organic Exchange, Cotton SA, the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and Woolworths were instrumental in setting up the commercial-scale organic cotton pilot programme in 2007.

Organic cotton initially yields less than conventional cotton as optimum levels of soil fertility have to be achieved and the right balance established with beneficial insects and trap crops to combat pests. However, over a period of three to four years, farming this way would prove cheaper, with farmers being able to produce on-farm a significant portion of the inputs needed to grow organic cotton, such as compost. Conventional cotton is traditionally grown using large amounts of fertiliser and pesticides – expensive chemicals that are ultimately also entwined within the fibre of the clothes we wear, seep into the waterways through evaporation and irrigation and are found in cotton by-products such as livestock feed.

Year two field trials and a number of research demonstration plots managed by the ARC have provided enough information to develop valuable training materials. Cotton SA’s July training course will be equipped with the new materials – a farmer toolkit with fact sheets on soil fertility and organic crop production techniques; an insect scouting guide; more detailed technical papers; and an AGRI-SETA-accredited training package.