Sugar cane and cash crop rotation helps improve soil health
Sugar cane was first planted in South Africa in 1848, and for most of the time since then was produced in a monocropping system. It was only in more recent years that agriculturalists and farmers began to understand the importance of biodiversity both above and below the soil surface.
As one sugar cane farmer, Dreyer Senekal, observes drily, “We used to have the view that if you needed to rotate your old sugar cane crop, you just planted a new sugar cane crop straight after it. The biggest change we might have made back then was to plant a different cane variety to the one we’d ploughed out.”
Senekal is the full-time agricultural manager of the Senekal Familie Boerdery (SFB), a diversified mega farming business established in 1978 by his father, Charl Senekal, who remains actively involved in the operations.
SFB’s agricultural enterprises cover 4 500ha of irrigated lands in Mkuze, northern KwaZulu-Natal with water piped from Jozini Dam. The primary enterprise is sugar cane, but
