Good day all,

I came across this website www.kragdag.co.za via an ad on gmail. 

There is an expo out Pretoria way where it seems some solar suppliers will be present including Victron.

9, 10 & 11 Augustus 2018(9:00 - 16:00)

18 minutes ago, Antony said:

There is an expo out Pretoria way where it seems some solar suppliers will be present including Victron.

The big one that you really want to go to is Solar Africa, the one in Jhb around April/May. There you will meet the big guys, who will fly in for the event. The local sales guys do attend other events as well. They were also present at Nampo.

Kragdag is mainly focused on the farmers IMO, but to my surprise I got news yesterday that just over 400 000 pre-registrations was received. that is excluding the guys that just rock up and visit.

Seems there are quite some interest in PV. Good thing IMO, specially with the road Eskom want to stick to.

I think a lot of people are again looking to go solar...

the weather up here has been, cold, very windy and cloudy for the last few days, not ideal solar power generation weather, and I suspect will also reduce the numbers visiting this event, seeing that it is mostly an outdoors type event.

14 minutes ago, Antony said:

I think a lot of people are again looking to go solar...

Looking at the numbers if the target audience is farmers then they going to make up less than 5% of the people there.

2 hours ago, Chris Hobson said:

5% of the people there

That's not a bad amount... 5% of a large number is... well.. .5% of a large number :)

There are only 35000 farmers in the whole country. So if 400 000 people have pre-registered then even if every farmer in the country comes to the day, the day has generated far more interest than its target market. If I was an organiser I would be overjoyed.

Victron has a stall there, for those interested in meeting them. I was a bit disappointed in what they (exhibitors) had to exhibit this year, but then again everyone has their own interest. Too many newbys to the solar market promoting inverters, panels and lithium batteries. But it's still a fun outing for the family. We enjoyed the animals, horse riding and good food a lot. 

1 hour ago, Chris Hobson said:

There are only 35000 farmers in the whole country

I think it's 35 000 commercial farming "units". Some estimates put it higher at 38 000, and some point out that some farmers are in charge of more than one unit.

Also, the way these are counted is by looking (amongst others) at VAT registration. By law you only need to register for VAT if your turnover is above a certain amount, so there are many small farmers that are not VAT registered. That makes it harder to count.

Officially we had 120 000 commercial farmers in 1994. Officially we now have 35 000. Less than a third. I'm not sure the difficulty in counting or VAT registration in any way explains the two thirds that are missing.

The one thing that continues to bother me, is what on earth happened to the land that was farmed by the people that left. It must have gone somewhere... did farming units grow? What is really going on?

Sorry about the politics :-)

12 minutes ago, plonkster said:

I think it's 35 000 commercial farming "units".

I think there are many things to consider here as well, and just as many view points.

DAFF statistics put only 18% of farming units as commercial and the balance 82% as subsistence farmers.

Narrowing it down to like 35000 to 40000 farms/farmers would jump out as there are currently/ read 2018 Q1 average about 18000 farms in the market.

This would then relate to about 50%.

I would think that the "registered" visitors would be maybe 5% if that high Commercial and the balance would be subsistence farmers, (Small holdings etc.) like us wanting to withhold a buck or two from Corruption central?

 

I think there are very few farmers who are not VAT registered as all one's inputs are subject to VAT it makes economic sense (not administrative sense but definitely economic sense). My turnover is way below the VAT threshold but my business is VAT registered. 

2 hours ago, plonkster said:

Officially we had 120 000 commercial farmers in 1994. Officially we now have 35 000.

Officially before 1994 we had departments that worked. 
Officially after 1994 we have departments that don't work.

Edited August 10, 20186 yr by Guest

12 minutes ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

Officially after 1994 we now have no departments that work.

I don't know about that. StatsSA seems to be rather good at what they do, and the reason we know this is because the figures they publish are embarrassing. If someone wanted to tamper with this, surely they'd tamper with it to make it look good? :-)

1 minute ago, plonkster said:

StatsSA seems to be rather good at what they do, ... 

Ok. 

4 minutes ago, plonkster said:

 StatsSA seems to be rather good at what they do.....

did they not cock up a survey a while ago.

 

1 hour ago, Chris Hobson said:

very few farmers who are not VAT registered

Hence my thinking that it is unlikely that you're going to miss more than half your farmers by overlooking them due to VAT registration, in other words, we are not going to discover all of a sudden that "phew... we have 70k farmers". We will find that we maybe have 45k. Thumb suck.

My dad said something intersting to me too: That this is one of the few lines of business where you buy a lot of your materials at retail prices, but are expected to sell your produce at wholesale prices.

1 minute ago, Chris Hobson said:

did they not cock up a survey a while ago.

Bankfout in u guns? :-P

Edit: I realise few people will get that reference. Let's see...

Edited August 10, 20186 yr by plonkster

2 minutes ago, plonkster said:

... VAT registration ... 

Hold a moment ... is that not the department that paid the Gupta's millions back in VAT ... whilst not paying the rest on time?

Another institution that was compromised?

And then you have this farm repo without compo ... if I was a farmer I would like to disappear from any list.

The data is 10 to 1 with the Co-ops ... and they ain't sharing sh*t with no Stats SA ... sacrilege, Van Riebeeck data!

 

No seriously, who says the farmers left in the first place, to the tune that is speculated above?
Yes, some have left ... but @Chris Hobson is still here!!! So it cannot be that.
And there are/where droughts and the fear of more farm murders and all that.

All the above, and more reasons than just this list, contributing to less farmers today.

Yet my 1st thought was: Data is wrong due to lack of leadership, dedication and working together for a better SA for all of us! Bleh.

5 minutes ago, The Terrible Triplett said:

All the above, and more reasons than just this list, contributing to less farmers today.

The numbers we have seems to concur that there's been a huge reduction in commercial farmers. All I am doing is the due diligence, to ask whether the numbers are necessarily correct, and if not, what the expected error might be. Is it reasonably possible that we miscounted half our farmers? Probably not, so the number must be less than 70k. Did we possibly count some farmers more than once? Yes, possibly, but probably no more than a few thousand at most, so 30k is a reasonable lower limit.

Then conversely, did we count them correctly in 1994? Did we accidentally count some more than once, overestimate? Again, it seems unreasonable to think that we overcounted by a factor of two.

So very conservatively, we have half the commercial farmers now that we had in 1994.

So either the average farm size grew by 100%, or there must be some land somewhere that is no longer used for commercial farming, and by some I mean LOTS. What happened to that land. This is the question that nobody can or wants to answer.

(Seriously, I'm sorry for making this political, but Chris started it with his 35k comment).

I think membership of agricultural associations is used as a basis for the 35k comment. Yes there will be under reporting as some folk just refuse to participate but conversely there are small scale farmers who possibly would not count as commercial farmers who due to the nature of farmers' associations and the issues they address are members nevertheless.

35k sounds about right. There are less than 200 dairy farmers left in the Free State.

I went to the expo today and there was a lot of interest around the solar displays where people stood in groups listening to the "experts".

The place was very well attended today, the queue at the mobile ABSA ATM alone was over 50 people long.

As a matter of interest;

You cannot register as a vat vendor anymore, unless you can prove that your turnover is more than 1 million per year.

I have just been through this and got very upset, but they say " that is the law"

 

On 2018/08/10 at 1:46 PM, plonkster said:

Bankfout in u guns? 😛

Edit: I realise few people will get that reference. Let's see...

Boereplaas bordspel?

10 minutes ago, Vosser said:

Boereplaas bordspel?

Monopoly. One of the Chance cards gains you R100 because of a banking mistake.