For weeks in May and June 2025, widely followed accounts on X have circulated eye-catching and divisive statistics about race and farming in South Africa. But ironically, these numbers originated in a speech aimed at debunking misinformation, and were then misquoted and repurposed for a global audience.
Where did it all start?
The account @EndWokeness, which has 3.7 million followers, played a key role. It has a track record of spreading false information. In the past, some of the account’s posts have been countered by community notes, which are factual corrections added by X users, though some of these have later been removed.
False posts, like a viral story of immigrants to the US eating pets, remain on the site uncorrected. But as the Washington Post has reported, the account has often escaped consequences. It has boasted about making thousands of dollars a month from such claims and its posts are sometimes amplified by platform owner Elon Musk.
In May 2025, @EndWokeness took to posting about the 49 white South Africans who claimed refugee status in the US. While at the same time implementing sweeping deportation policies, US president Donald Trump has claimed that white Afrikaner South Africans face persecution, for example through employment equity laws and the false narrative of “white genocide”.
Based on this, he has allowed asylum claims from South Africans who are “Afrikaners or members of a racial minority”, even while blocking most other refugees.
In this context, @EndWokeness warned that South Africa’s perceived actions against Afrikaners would have negative consequences, claiming that “white farmers currently produce” over 90% of all corn, soy beans, wheat, cotton, citrus, and almost all potatoes (99%).
These stats were likely copied directly from a reply to @EndWokeness posted less than two hours earlier by another account, @CrazyVibes_1, which had added: “Why are the black farmers not commercially producing? They do own millions of hectares of land. Approximately 50% of all the Land area when you add state land.”
But @CrazyVibes_1 was also copying. Its tweet, word for word including formatting and emojis, matched one posted in March by @twatterbaas, who has repeated variations of these same claims before.
News24, South Africa's most-visited news website, identified @twatterbaas as Sebastiaan Jooste, a former farmer. After the investigation the government condemned what it called deliberate misinformation and the spread of racial hatred.
Jooste’s posts helped push these claims to a global audience, possibly even reaching Musk, the world’s richest man. Yet no one along the way seems to have checked whether the numbers were accurate. So we did.
In his earliest post, Jooste said the statistics came from an 18 February X post by Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist at the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, a group that represents commercial farming businesses.
Sihlobo’s post showed that his research was used in a speech by agriculture minister John Steenhuisen titled Briefing on malicious misinformation. In the speech, Steenhuisen said that “South Africa remains an economically unjust society”, including in farming. As evidence, he cited Sihlobo’s estimates of the average share of black farmers in commercial agricultural output between 2015 and 2019 (though he mistakenly said 2015 to 2020).
To calculate the output of white farmers, Jooste seems to have simply subtracted Sihlobo’s figures from 100%. For instance, Sihlobo estimated black farmers produced 1.3% of commercially sold wheat, leading Jooste to conclude that white farmers must then produce the other “98.7% of all the wheat”. But this ignores key context.
How much food did the world produce in 2024?
Widely shared stats are incomplete ‘guesstimates’
The original statistics came from a paper called Agriculture in South Africa, written by Sihlobo and Prof Johann Kirsten, director of Stellenbosch University’s Bureau for Economic Research (BER).
Their data was based on records from the National Agricultural Marketing Council (NAMC), which collects figures from agricultural organisations. For example, the Citrus Growers’ Association tracks citrus exports and levies based on reports from its members. These organisations have committed to initiatives addressing inequalities in farming, and so keep some data related to race.
But these records do not represent all agricultural activity in South Africa. The NAMC’s data is limited to commercial activity reported by individual agricultural organisations.
Kirsten told Africa Check that although quoted extensively, these numbers were “incomplete … and in any case only a guesstimate”. He said “it is very difficult to allocate a race dimension to agricultural output” without more comprehensive data and concluded the number was an “inaccurate” minimum that could be much higher.
Speaking to Africa Check, Sihlobo described Jooste’s framing as “a ‘naughty’ use of our valuable research”. Not only could these figures from 2019 have changed since, but black farmers in South Africa may well have a larger share in commercial agriculture than the statistics represent.
While these figures are misleading, black farmers are underrepresented in agricultural output – but Jooste obscured the reasons why.
Historical divides in commercial agriculture
In his book A Country of Two Agricultures, Sihlobo explains that agricultural surveys typically exclude “transactions in small value chains and sales in small local markets”.
It is worth nothing that the vast majority of South African households that farm do so mainly to feed themselves. According to Statistics South Africa estimates based on the 2022 census, 80.7% of agricultural households grow food only for their own use, and another 7.7% also sell some of it. These households usually don't appear in agricultural surveys based on commercial data.
In his post, Jooste conflated commercial agriculture – produce eventually sold in formal markets – with “all” produce grown in South Africa. There are many reasons why produce grown by black farmers is less likely to be recorded in these kinds of formal surveys.
Dr Siphe Zantsi, an economist at the Agricultural Research Council, explained that historical divides resulted in black farmers not having access to the commercial sector to begin with.
For example, Zantsi said, apartheid-era spatial planning has meant “black smallholder farmers are located in remote areas (former homelands) that are far from the output markets”. These areas, also called “Bantustans”, were segregated areas designed to keep black South Africans out of major urban areas and political life.
Zantsi also referred to a 2015 paper by South African researcher Stefan Schirmer, which noted that “Apartheid … massively increased the barriers that black farmers were forced to confront”, who were cut off from markets and confined to unproductive land, locking many into “almost permanent forms of unemployment or employment in very low income jobs”.
Kirsten further told Africa Check that an often overlooked issue was “who owns the best quality land and most productive land”.
This helps explain why white farmers still dominate commercial agriculture. Zantsi noted that most agribusinesses in South Africa were white-owned, while black farmers often owned smaller pieces of land that were usually further from economic hubs, making it harder for them to sell in formal markets.
This is supported by research that suggests South African commercial agriculture has been increasingly dominated by large, well-resourced farms. Zantsi cited 2013 research showing that as supermarkets became more powerful, they were incentivised to buy mainly from large commercial farms, pushing small-scale farmers out of supply chains.
On top of this, there is the issue of land ownership, something that Jooste apparently tried to side-step, but not very deftly.
It wasn’t in the first version of his tweet, but at some point Jooste tacked on the claim that black farmers owned “approximately 50% of all the land area”.
This statistic veers far from all reliable data on the topic. Experts say inequality in agricultural land ownership is substantial and a key reason why black farmers have a smaller role in commercial agriculture.
According to the 2017 land audit report, the most recent national data available, 72% of all individually owned land was held by white people. Land owned by individuals of all other racial groupings made up the remainder, including just 4% by “African” or black individuals.
In 2023, the Bureau for Economic Research estimated that around 25% of freehold agricultural land had been redistributed to black South Africans since 1994. This includes all land that has a registered title deed.
But this land can be owned by multiple people or a corporation or other entity, which makes it complicated to determine ownership by race. Even so, the BER estimates that white farmers still own about 74% of freehold agricultural land, or 58 million out of 77.5 million hectares.
Black farmers may own 13.5 million hectares (about 17%), but Kirsten said this was likely an undercount as title deeds did not include race and so surnames were used as a proxy, which could be inaccurate.
Even if this is an under-estimate, nothing suggests that most farmland is black-owned. This could be why Jooste specified that black farmers own “approximately 50% of all the land area when you add state land”. But the BER estimates around 6 million hectares of the remaining freehold farmland is owned by the government or has been restituted to black owners through financial compensation. Even if you include all of that, black ownership would still only equal about 25% of freehold farmland.
A final category that could include farmland is rural land in the former homelands. Not all of this was used for farming, Kirsten said. Adding all of this and all government farmland, white farmers would still own around 60% of all farmland.
This again contradicts Jooste’s claim, but also misses the point that not all “farmland” can be properly used for farming.
Not all farmland can be farmed
Of South Africa’s 77.5 million hectares of freehold farmland, less than a quarter (18 million) is considered arable. Much of the rest is dry land like Karoo or Kalahari desert, which has limited farming value. Black farmers are more likely to own land with little agricultural potential and the former homelands system explicitly carved out more valuable land for white South Africans.
Efforts to redress these imbalances by providing land to black farmers have faced criticism. Zantsi explained that a “lack of timely post settlement support” had left many beneficiaries without money or resources to run a farm.
Sihlobo added that this land was generally leased, meaning recipients didn’t actually own the land they farmed. This made it harder to get loans or to buy and modernise equipment.
Land ownership in South Africa is complex and contested, and the data certainly isn’t perfect. But even the most generous reading of the available statistics doesn’t back Jooste’s claim that most agricultural land is black-owned.
It is especially striking that Jooste misused data from a speech meant to fight misinformation. By removing context, he gave a misleading picture of South African agriculture – one that distorts both its history and current reality.
Keegan Leech
