Gamtoos Valley farmers now pray for a flood to save them

PATENSIE, EASTERN CAPE – With the level of the all-important Kouga Dam dropping to under 9% of its capacity – and that after good rain fell at the end of May – farmers in the Gamtoos Valley are facing a ‘dire’ future in which they may not be able to survive.

The pending cut in allocations to possibly just 20% of users’ full annual quotas for the 132 water users in the valley who rely wholly on the dam for their citrus, cash-crop, and dairy production, would mean a dramatic drop in economic activity in a region heavily dependent on agricultural production.

Ahead of the announcement of the water allocation for 2020/21 by the Department of Water and Sanitation, Rienette Colesky, CEO of the Gamtoos Irrigation Board (GIB), which oversees water usage from the dam, said that life for farmers in the region was ‘extremely difficult’.

With the dam level standing at 8.8% at the beginning of this week, GIB predicts that this year’s water allocation will be just 20%.

“The reality is that farmers find it very difficult to survive on anything less than 40%, but there’s no water in Kouga Dam, so nobody expects to receive more than a 20% allocation.”

GIB chairman and citrus farmer in the valley, Tertius Meyer, said the situation was ‘dire’.

“For vegetable and other cash crop farmers, a restricted allocation means they will not be able to plant a full crop, which means they will need to hire less labour,” he said.

“This past year’s 85% water allocation gave farmers a bit of a breather from heavy water restrictions of previous years. As citrus farmers, we used the higher water allocations to plant young trees which are now maturing and require more water. So, there is more pressure on us if we get restricted allocations.

“With the catchment being as dry as it is, we need floods or something close to floods to fill up the dam – and soon.”

Pieter Ferreira, owner of the Wagon Drift farm in the Gamtoos Valley, said that all they could do now was to pray for rain.

“I have been farming here for 48 years. If I cannot plant potatoes this year, it will be the first time in the farm’s history that I have not been able to do that,” he said.

Ferreira said that farmers were used to dealing with adversity. “We are used to drought just as we are used to floods, but the last floods were in 1996, 24 years ago. What is happening now is different. I have been really battling with the drought for almost four years.

“Many of us installed boreholes, but the quality of the water in the Gamtoos Valley is not good, so we mixed it with what little water we received from the dam. Now we won’t be able to do that.”

Another problem cash-crop farmers are having to face is a knock-on effect the Covid-19 pandemic.

“With restaurants closed, the normal market for most of the lettuce crop has dried up. Even if we can produce, we can’t sell,” Ferreira said.

According to Johan Kotze, chairman of Langkloof Water and director for Dutoit Agri Eastern Cape which owns farms in the Langkloof, the last time the region received its average annual rainfall was in 2015.

“Most dams in this area are either dry or have very little water,” said Kotze, indicating that these would first need to overflow before runoff from good rains could reach the Kouga Dam.

“I have spoken to other farmers here who say periods of below-average rainfall are getting longer and more frequent,” he said. “The last time the drought was this bad was in the 1980s.”

Anticipating an allocation of around 20% for the coming year Colesky said that 2018 was “the closest year to where we are now with Kouga Dam. That year we were also given 20%, but good rains that followed the announcement saw that figure adjusted to 40%.”

However, with dam levels extremely low throughout Nelson Mandela Metro, Colesky said that the low state of resources would lead to severe restrictions on water allocations from the Kouga Dam.

Aside from the agricultural water users, the Kouga and Nelson Mandela Bay municipalities also draw from the dam – one of the Eastern Cape’s largest water sources.

The department would make a call on the new quotas “after a thorough scientific analysis taking into account the level of all the water resources in the Algoa System and the demand connected to them,” Colesky said.

The water allocations are expected to be announced “sometime” before end of this month.

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