Johan van den Berg Independent Agricultural Meteorologist (M.Sc Agric, Agricultural Meteorology, UFS)

When smoke rises from wildfires in the western United States, it pummels clouds with tiny airborne particles.

Important Issues: La Nina in full swing. Above average rainfall expected for December and first part of January for the Summer Rainfall Area and further rain for the Winter Rainfall Area in the first part of December.

In the one hand, dams that just a few years ago were almost running on empty are now filled to the brim, and much of the South African veld is a riot of green that has unfolded under a canopy of clouds. But too much rain makes no grain, and farmers, as well as industry watchers, are now looking skyward for a sunny reprieve.

The Impact of High 2022 Summer Rainfall on Grain Production - South Africa

March marks the end of southern Africa’s 2021/2022 summer wet-season. Since its onset in October, most summer rainfall zone regions have experienced wetter than normal conditions.

We are about a month away from the start of the 2022/2023 summer crop season. Farmers in SA’s eastern regions, which includes the eastern Free State, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape, will start planting by mid-October. This will primarily be summer grains and oilseeds.

The start of South Africa's 2022/23 summer season has brought heavy rains across most regions with varied agricultural implications.

The heavy rain in the Western Cape over the past few days has both a positive and negative impact on vineyards.

Two essential data releases in the global agricultural environment in the past two weeks painted a promising picture of global agricultural supplies and prices  — the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations’s Global Food Price Index and the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report published by the United States department of agriculture. 

The latest Seasonal Climate Watch from the SA Weather Service (Saws), which looks five months ahead, still sees a wet summer for South Africa’s northeast and a dry one for the western and central regions — an outlook clouded by the El Niño weather pattern.  

When the 2023/24 South Africa's agricultural season started, we feared production conditions would become more challenging than we have seen in the last few seasons.

This is a story about how our climate models were built - how the water cycle was added to a model of air movement, how heat behavior was integrated in, and how pertinent properties of soil and vegetation were put in.

The current heat and scant rains are worrying for S.A. agriculture

With a growing global population and rising affluence in many regions, the appetite for meat is picking up.

The forecast for a scorcher of a summer has been extended to February, according to the SA Weather Service’s latest monthly Seasonal Climate Watch, which looks five months ahead.

 Food companies and consumers have breathed a sigh of relief after futures prices declined over the past few months. The futures trade and producers, however, have been seeking reasons to have hope for higher prices.

The South African Weather Service (Saws) has issued its Seasonal Climate Watch for December 2024 to April 2025, providing crucial insights into expected weather patterns across the country. South Africans can expect a hot summer with below-normal rainfall in some regions and a neutral El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) for now.

The rainforest in the Amazon basin transpires vast amounts of gaseous isoprene. Until now, it was assumed that this molecule is not transported far up into the atmosphere, as it rapidly declines when exposed to light conditions.