Sugar cane and cash crop rotation helps improve soil health

Decades of monocropping has compromised soil health on many South African sugar cane farms, negatively affecting their productivity. Dreyer Senekal, co-director of Senekal Familie Boerdery, explains to Lloyd Phillips how he is experimenting with strategic crop rotation to improve the soil of his sugar cane enterprise.

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 SFB also produces citrus, macadamia and chillies. In addition, Senekal has a small commercial beef herd that he runs as a hobby.

“Our access to irrigation and our warmer climate allows us to harvest our sugar cane every 12 months. Depending on the sugar cane variety, we get eight to 10 harvests before we plough out and replant. On average, we replant 400ha to 600ha annually on a rotational basis across our sugar cane operation. Our main varieties are N49 and N57, and we’ll soon be harvesting trials of newer varieties to see how they do. All of these varieties are specifically bred for production under irrigation,” says Senekal.