I had an opportunity to address members of the South African Parliament, mainly the portfolio committee responsible for agriculture on September 2, 2025. When I received the invitation to reflect on the sector’s operating conditions and the impact of geopolitics, I thought it would be a good opportunity first to highlight the changing structure of South Africa’s agriculture.

However, as I prepared my notes, I realised that there were some vital policy matters to address in my speech, and I could perhaps present the key points about the sector’s structure succinctly in this letter.

The reason I am considering the structure of the sector is that I have seen, in several cases, pronouncements about South Africa’s agriculture that don’t accurately reflect its reality. Such instances remind me of the concept of “Zombie ideas“, which was popularised by the Nobel laureate, the economist, Paul Krugman, which is also the title of his new book, Arguing with Zombies.

This term refers to “ideas that keep being killed by evidence but shamble relentlessly forward, essentially because they suit a political agenda”.

We have many such “zombie ideas” in South Africa’s agriculture. This may seem petty, but some of the things I have heard, for example, are that:

• South Africa has more or less 40,000 commercial farmers
• Then there are more or less 2.5 million small-scale farmers
• And a further 2.75 million people who perform some form of agricultural activity for home consumption or sale to the market

This is all incorrect.

My joint work with Professor Johann Kirsten of the Bureau for Economic Research (BER) has, over the years, endeavoured to reduce inaccuracies about land reform and the size and structure of the agricultural sector. Some of these efforts are evident in our chapter in the Oxford University Handbook on the South African Economy, in our latest book, The Uncomfortable Truth about South Africa’s Agriculture, and in numerous newspaper columns.

First, we need to deal with definitions:

• A commercial farmer is any individual, entity, or household involved in agricultural production with the intention of selling to the market and therefore buys inputs to produce the commodity.
• Large farmer: typically, a farming enterprise that has an annual commercial turnover of R22,5 million or more.
• Medium-scale farmer: Commercial turnover of between R13,5 million and R22,5 million
• Small and micro farms (commercial): Turnover below R13.5 million.
• Subsistence farmer/household: A Household that produces mainly for home consumption, usually in addition to social grants and migrant wages. Virtually no commercial sales.
• Household: There should be roughly 4 to 6 people per household.

Here is the thing. The 2017 Census of Commercial Agriculture used the 40,102 farming enterprises registered for VAT as the sample frame. As we will show later, not all commercial farmers are registered for VAT, as the current threshold for VAT registration with the South African Revenue Service (SARS) is R1 million in annual turnover.

Fact: The 40,000 figure only refers to VAT-registered farm enterprises. They are distributed according to the definitions as shown in the Table below. Approximately 46% of all commercial farms (the majority of which are owned by white individuals) registered for VAT are classified by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) as micro-enterprises or family farms.

We are fortunate that Stats SA released the latest numbers on agricultural households on 31 July 2025, extracted from the 2022 Population Census. This makes for fascinating reading but also requires careful interpretation to avoid the same mistakes alluded to earlier.

The most crucial observation in the report can be summarised as follows:

• Households producing only for sale (thus commercial farmers): 106,753
• Households producing mainly for sale (also commercial): 177,530
• Households primarily producing for own consumption and households only for own consumption: 2,2 million (this is subsistence farmers, backyard gardeners and livestock keepers with few chickens and other animals)

Statistics South Africa also makes it clear that Black Africans account for a large share of households engaged in farming. I am not referring to shares of income or production here, but rather the number of individuals involved in agriculture. White commercial farming households account for only 21.4% of the total number of commercial farming households in South Africa. They account for a large share of income.

In summary, these data indicate that South Africa has 284,283 commercial farming households, as estimated from the agricultural questions in the 2022 population census. This number corresponds to the 254,956 farming households we reported in our chapter in the Oxford University Handbook on the South African Economy, which we estimated from the 2017 Agricultural Census and the 2016 community survey.

So, we can now kill the “Zombie ideas” in South Africa’s agriculture by remembering the following facts:

• Fact 1: There are 284,283 commercial farming households in South Africa, of which only 40,000 are registered for VAT.
• Fact 2: 98.5% of these households are classified as small and micro farm enterprises

Therefore, as we engage with agricultural matters, we must be cognizant that it is a sizable sector, with many farmers who are commercialised. Importantly, the sector serves a large number of people. Therefore, policy-making in the sector must be rooted in reality, and we must avoid leaning on “zombie ideas”.

By Wandile Sihlobo 

Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and the author of three books, “The Uncomfortable Truth About South Africa’s Agriculture (2025)”, “A Country of Two Agricultures: The Disparities, The Challenges, The Solutions (2023)” and “Finding Common Ground: Land, Equity and Agriculture (2020)“.

He is a Senior Lecturer Extraordinary at the Department of Agricultural Economics at Stellenbosch University. Sihlobo is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand, and a Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes University.