Setting Setting the SCENE

by Dr Ilse Trautmann

Seasons are changing – and so should we!

AAs winter is approaching, our agricultural landscape will be changing to the proverbial “greener pastures” as depicted on our AI smart cover page. Having rain, albeit in some cases more than expected, could leave us with a false sense of “we are ok” in terms of climate change and our vulnerability in the agricultural sector. Therefore, our behaviour should change to ensure sustainability at all levels.

The year 2023 started at a pace we have never experienced before and brought challenges we did not foresee – yet we kept our heads high and performed exceptionally and the figures were changing – for the better! Peoples’ lives were changed as the Western Cape recorded the largest employment increase in the country quarteron-quarter, with an additional 167 000 employed persons in our province, as was announced during February 2023.

This edition of AgriProbe again brings a smorgasbord of changes brought about by our departmental interventions at many levels. From a change in our perceptions on the cannabis industry, changing the way we approach partners in collaborative efforts, changing the way we approach loadshedding and handy hints to overcome challenges in this regard, to bringing the reader the changes over 125 years at Elsenburg college to empower our agricultural youth and bolstering our agricultural sector.

Our journal section brings articles on three important commodities in the Western Cape, being ostriches, plums and the pork industry. And here we also see a change – from production practises to market development and changes in export figures.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world” and this was followed by Barack Obama with the statement, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

Let us see the change in season as our prompt to change the way we live, work, perceive our fellow South Africans, and let us change agriculture to a global leader and role model in many ways.

Dr IlseTrautmann

PUBLISHING TEAM

Publisher: Erika Alberts

Layout & design: Carmen le Roux

Copy editor: Aletta Pretorius-Thiart

Financial director: Pat Botha

For publishing enquiries, e-mail: media@mlpmedia.co.za