Determinants of commercial farmers’ willingness to mentor emerging farmers in South African land reform

ABSTRACT

To address the challenge posed by a lack of commercial farming skills among beneficiaries of redistributed farms, the South African Government has introduced a mentorship program, by which established commercial farmers share expertise with newly settled farmers. However, commercial farmers’ willingness to mentor emerging farmers, and the determinants of their willingness at a national level, are not explicitly known. This article attempts to contribute in this regard by implementing a binary logistic regression model, preceded by descriptive statistics, to a sample of 475 commercial farmers. Our findings show that a majority (76 per cent) of commercial farmers are willing to mentor emerging farmers. Younger farmers with higher levels of education are most likely to show willingness to mentor. Farm characteristics, such as high turnover and low perceived threat regarding a “lack of dependable labour” also contribute to the willingness to mentor. Therefore, a farmer and his or her farm performance should be key attributes in the criteria for mentor selection.

KEYWORDS:

• Farming skills
• skills transfer
• land reform
• emerging farmer
• VELVET

Acknowledgements

Siphe Zantsi also thank the GMRDC of the University of Fort Hare for funding the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term is largely used in South African scholarly literature to refer to land reform beneficiaries (see Gwiriri et al. 2019).

Additional information

Funding

We want to thank the National Research Foundation [Grant Number 107800] and the Swiss National Science Foundation [Grant Number 170836] for funding the field survey for this study.

Notes on contributors

Siphe Zantsi

iphe Zantsi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (PDRF) in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension at the University of Fort Hare. He has previously worked as a PDRF at the University of Johannesburg for a year and has worked for Agroscope in Switzerland for 2 years. He holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Stellenbosch University in South Africa. His research interests are on land redistribution as well as in rural and agricultural development.

Kandas Cloete

Kandas Cloete is a senior analyst for Horticulture at the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP) and a research fellow at the Department of Agricultural Economics in Stellenbosch University. She has previously worked for insurance companies as risk analyst. She holds a PhD from Stellenbosch University in South Africa.