Growers in South Africa’s Ceres fruit growing region, which produces roughly 40 per cent of the country’s apple and pear crops, say they have suffered devastating losses due to hail over the weekend.
Leading growers say the hail in the Witzenberg, Warm Bokkeveld and Koue Bokkeveld regions have wiped out between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of their crops, depending on the region.
“In 60 years of farming in the Witzenberg region, we have never seen anything like this,” says one of the region’s leading growers, Peter Graaff.
Gys du Toit, managing director production at Dutoit Agri, says his group has never seen damage on this scale.
“The Witzenberg region has been particularly badly hit where we have suffered huge losses at two of our farms. A third farm, Nooitgedacht, where we also have the biggest share of our cherry production, has also been devastated.”
While it will take some time to establish the full impact of the damage, growers speculated that the total loss could easily top 12m cartons of apples and pears – potentially amounting to losses of R1.2bn (€87.6m).
The hail hit apple, pear, stonefruit and cherry crops and has been widespread. Du Toit says that while his group will have to introduce cost saving measures in the affected areas, the company’s staff will be redeployed to places where there has been no damage.
“In a sense we are still lucky because we have productions spread out over a wide region,' he explains. 'The farms in the Koue Bokkeveld region have been less affected and we still have our farming operations in the Langkloof where we will try and maximise our resources.”
Most of the growers in the Witzenberg region, however, will just have to face the fact that they have lost 80 per cent of their crops and will have a bleak 2014. In some cases growers have already indicated that they will have to cut back on their staff, which will also affect the social and economic stability of the region.
Other fruit regions in the Western Cape experienced a deluge of rain over the past weekend, with the areas of Elgin, Villiersdorp, Somerset West and Stellenbosch reporting flooding. At this stage damage in these areas are also being assessed.
“We understand that we are working with nature and that every year we have to face challenges, but the scale of the damage is something we did not expect,” adds Du Toit.
The damage in the Ceres region comes in the wake of earlier frost damage in the early table grape region of the Orange River. This wiped about 2m cartons off the expected grape exports from the region.
