Organic Cotton Farming in South Africa: Media Information Day: Harvest of First Locally Grown Organic Cotton Crop

The purpose of the pilot project on organic cotton farming in South Africa is to facilitate the development of commercial-scale organic cotton farming in South Africa by 2010. A number of organic cotton growing trial sites have been established on both commercial and small-scale farms to assess the viability of commercially producing organic cotton in South Africa, create a learning experience for all partners involved in the project on how to grow organic cotton in a viable and sustainable way and establish a value chain for the production, marketing and retailing or organic cotton in South Africa.

Project partners include:

• ComMark as a funding partner to the project.
• Organic Exchange who, as a non-profit organisation committed to expanding organic agriculture, with a specific focus on increasing the production and use of organically grown fibres such as cotton, brings business and technical expertise to the project.
• Woolworths South Africa, who brings market, retail and value chain expertise to the project and has agreed to buy 100% of the organic cotton harvested at the end of May 2008 from these pilot fields to turn into a range of organic T-shirts which will be launched in their shops in November 2008, together with their business (and value chain) partners – Monviso, Frame Spinning and Frame Knitting.
• Both commercial (conventional) cotton farmers and a number of small-scale farmers (mainly organic food growers) in areas conducive to organic cotton production as a part of their rotation crop strategy who conduct the demonstrations/pilots for organic cotton on allocated lots of land.
• Cotton South Africa, who provides testing, quality management and farmer training expertise; and
• Agricultural Research Council (ARC), who carries out research around the results from the trials conducted on the research plots.

ComMark and its project partners visited three commercial farms near Musina in Limpopo province in April 2008 to review the organic trial sites and participate in a Field Day where the interim results from the trials and the knowledge acquired during the process so far were shared between the project partners.

The May 2008 visit was specifically organised as a media activity around the harvest of the first locally grown organic cotton crop on one of the three commercial pilot sites mentioned above, Hannaline Farms, with commercial cotton farmer Jacques Willemse as the pilot implementer.

The intention was to take a specifically targeted selection of media on a trip to the farm to see the cotton being harvested and collect information from the project partners around the local experience to date with organic cotton farming – to generate press coverage for this important milestone in our organic journey and disseminate, through the media, some of the lessons learnt so far from the demonstration pilots.

ComMark and its partners are thrilled about how the story of growing organic cotton locally is being told and information, both practical and technical, is being disseminated. Prominent South African agri-business magazines, The Farmer’s Weekly and Landbouweekblad, as well as Agri Newspaper have published feature articles, while Hip2B² TV, a weekly teen ‘edutainment’ show on SABC2, which aims to spark teenagers’ interest in Maths, Science, Technology and Entrepreneurship and provide them with the means to explore these areas of learning further, in this way making STEM accessible to all learners, has featured the pilot project at Hannaline Farms, with information from when the seeds where planted to this first succesfull harvest of organic cotton in South Africa.