Commercialisation of communal cattle -production systems in the Musekwa valley

English: This study was conducted among 55 (n=55) randomly selected communal cattle farmers in the Musekwa Valley of the Limpopo Province, South Africa. The farmers were interviewed using closed and open-ended questions as part of a structured questionnaire-based survey. Thirty key informants were further profiled and interviewed using both closed and openended questions. The main objective of the study was to investigate the constraints on and the opportunities for the commercialisation of communal cattle-production systems in the study area. The specific objectives were to characterise both the communal production systems and also the cattle farmers. The study further estimated the productivity of the communal cattleproduction systems and additionally measured the degree of participation of cattle farmers in the mainstream formal cattle-marketing activities in the study area. The results of the study revealed that all the interviewed communal cattle farmers in the study area did indeed farm in a communal land-use system. In addition, the results revealed that the majority of the communal cattle farmers in the study area were old, lacked proper formal school education, had poor basic literacy, and lacked entrepreneurial and animal husbandry skills that constrained commercialisation of this particular cattle-production subsector. The descriptive results of the study revealed the majority of the communal cattle farmers in the study area to be poor adopters of banking (52.7%), animal breeding (74.1%), farm insurance (100.0%), loans and credit (92.7%), private land (100.0%), own transport (94.5%), commodity marketing (60.0%) and membership of formal farmer organisations (80.0%). The empirical results of the study revealed that 60.0% of these particular cattle farmers were probably not productive, while only 40.0% were probably productive. The majority of the cattle farmers are currently still largely subsistence orientated in that the results revealed that 56.4% of the farmers were selling their animals through informal marketing channels and only 43.6% were selling through formal marketing channels. Cattle production, productivity and mainstream formal cattle marketing are mainly constrained by these farmers' poor access to cattle-production inputs, meagre household endowments, poor adoption of modern technologies, lack of on- and off-farm infrastructure, inadequate skills in animal husbandry and the weak institutional support provided to them. Furthermore, the empirical results revealed that distance to the mainstream formal cattle market, the poor keeping of farm records, cattle ownership and weaning of calves had the most significant impact on farm productivity and on mainstream formal cattle-market participation among the farmers. Among the opportunities revealed by the results of the study were the current pro-poor agricultural policy developed by the South African government specifically to reform and commercialise the communal agricultural systems, good farmer experience regarding cattle production, the existing formal cattle-marketing options and the willingness of farmers to adopt new cattle-production and -marketing technologies and skills. Measured on the Agricultural Commercialisation Continuum (ACC), the cattle-production systems in the study area displayed some increased characteristics of a highly subsistence oriented agricultural production system.