Tips From The Western Cape's Cucumber Giant

Tunnel production may seem a relatively simple and profitable way to farm, but it involves high capital costs and has a narrow margin of error. Nico Laubscher Jnr spoke to Glenneis Kriel about the lessons that he and his team have learnt at Alzanne, near Vredendal, over the years.

- Glenneis Kriel

A little over three decades ago, Nico Laubscher Snr planted cucumbers in tunnels on his farm near Vredendal in the Olifants River Valley to add value to land too marginal for wine grape production. The cucumbers turned out to be so profitable that he later uprooted several vineyards to expand production.

Today, his farming enterprise, Alzanne, has over 100 tunnels covering an area of roughly 10ha in total, making it one of the largest cucumber producers in the country.

Replicating this success under the current production and economic environment would be near impossible, according to Laubscher’s son, Nico Jnr. He explains that his father’s first six tunnels paid for themselves within a year, allowing him to use the income generated to subsidise expansion. However, the return on investment has been slower since 1998, when they purchased their first multispan tunnel with wet pad and fans for automated climate control. They bought another in 2004, and a third in 2006.

“The cost of multi-span tunnels combined with rising labour, electricity and input costs, has become so exorbitant that it no longer justifies the investment if you’re going to produce cucumbers. The price of cucumbers is less than half of what it was three years ago,” Laubscher Jnr says.

‘START SMALL’

Another challenge is that the margin for error in tunnel production is much narrower than for crops grown in the open air. His advice to other producers keen to venture into this type of farming is therefore to start small, perhaps with second-hand tunnels, and to expand production systematically as they gain experience.

Apart from this, the demand for cucumbers in the Western and Eastern Cape is limited, so merely ‘dumping’ the crop on the municipal market can backfire and cause prices to collapse. Farmers should secure a market before buying or planting anything.