Grain

TILLAGE

As members of the Overberg Conservation Trust. it is important for us to manage the “Renosterveld” responsible in relation to conservation.

As grain and sheep farmers, we strive for sustainability in both branches in relation to production and reproduction, grain, wool, and meat.

The model consists of 50/50, dryland lucerne / grain. This not only creates a sustainable crop rotation pattern in our opinion, but also hedges our risks here in the Southern Cape where we have already experienced difficult grain years.

Alfalfa is the best crop rotation in our opinion. Land must rest; therefore, we do not follow the practice of “continuous cropping”, on the contrary, we are not advocates of it.

We make use of minimum cultivation. After the previous harvest season, as many residues as possible are left on the ground to conserve soil moisture. Weed control is intensively controlled with herbicides on a regular basis. A tooth implement is used for planting purposes, and this is the only soil disturbance that takes place.

Precision farming is part of the Van As Brothers practices that make production more efficient.  A lot of technology is used to make modern agriculture more efficient for example:  Global Positioning Systems (GPS) that guided tractors, harvesters, sprayers and planters, electromagnetic soil mapping, soil sample collection, crop, and soil colour index maps.

We make use of Precision farming in:
Grid samples
pH corrections
Correct seed placement
AMS products: Greenstar and Auto-Steer, yield, and data charts
Chemistry by precision application

MARKETING

Marketing is influenced by two important aspects, namely, climate conditions and at least a 20% net profit per hectare.

We pursuit marketing as follows:

Harvest and store grain in co-operation silos to sell at a later stage when the price increases
The advantage is that we can share in price increases later in the season due to supply and demand factors. However, the disadvantage is that there is no form of price risk protection and the cost of storage; grain handling and interest are a big factor.

Pre-harvest forward contracts
The advantage is that this strategy helps to control and hedge price risk. Depending on the kind of contract, the downside is that we do not share in the benefits of favourable price movements.

Sell grain on spot market and buy futures
We sell our grain on the spot market as soon as they harvest it and buy futures to stay in the market. The advantage is that we can still share in price increases and do not have to pay any storage fees.

As supply and demand conditions change, we reviewed and revised our marketing plan on a regular basis.