Technical Yearbook 2023

JULY

Collaboration to mitigate the risk of climate change By Gabrielle Redelinghuys

Every business owner should better understand and monitor external factors that influence the success or failure of their business. So too, farmers need to understand the influences on their business, whether it be seed costs, infrastructure bottlenecks, market prices or load shedding, impacting the success of their crop yield and consequent profit margins. Marius Boshoff, Managing Director of Villa Crop Protection, a WinField United South Africa (WUSA) company, highlights that “monitoring and understanding day-to day weather and short-term climate variability is vital for farmers to optimise resource use, maximise crop yields and reduce the risks associated with the weather by enabling preventative or proactive actions required to achieve enhanced success”.

Finance Minister, Enoch Godongwana, noted in his 2023 midterm budget speech that “climate change poses considerable risks and constraints to sustainable economic growth in South Africa, with recent events showing that extreme weather events, such as floods, heat waves and drought, are occurring more often”. WUSA-owned Metos ® SA, in collaboration with Pessl Instruments and TerraClim, undertook the Eureka Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) project in 2021 to provide farmers with climate-smart tools to mitigate the risks of climate change. Backed by intergovernmental funding body Eureka and public funding agencies, the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, this private public partnership (PPP) has funded the installation of over 200 weather stations in the Western Cape to create a dense weather station network to provide more accurate climate and terrain maps.

The 100th installation took place in Franschhoek on 7 April 2022. Coenraad Groenewald (Metos ® SA), Marius Boshoff (Villa Crop Protection), Garth Stephenson (Centre for Geographical Analysis), Ebené Oranje-Swarts (Metos ® SA), Gabrielle Redelinghuys (WinField United SA), and Juan du Plessis (Centre for Geographical Analysis).

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TECHNICAL YEARBOOK 2023