Why Small-Scale Farmers Are Losing Money

A soil fertility analysis at the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Agriculture and Rural Development laboratory costs R170 a sample on the department's 2025/26 tariff. That is less than one bag of LAN.

Most small-scale farmers we work with have never had one done.

That explains a lot about why margins on small plots keep shrinking. Nobody has shown these farmers that the cheapest thing they can buy is information.

The cost side has moved. The practice has not.

Fuel and fertiliser together make up roughly half of the input costs in field crops, and South Africa imports about 80% of its fertiliser, so every rand of currency weakness lands at the farm gate. Prices spiked in early 2026 when Middle East shipping was disrupted, then eased from about May as the Strait of Hormuz reopened. They remain higher than a year ago.

So the bag costs more than it used to, and on many plots it buys less yield. That second half is what gets missed.

Meanwhile the programme has not changed. Same blend, same rate, same two applications, year after year, often because it is what the co-op had in stock. When yield drops, the instinct is to add more fertiliser, which raises the cost and rarely recovers the yield.

The line item nobody sees

Speaking in 2020, Dr Hendrik Smith, then conservation agriculture facilitator at ASSET Research and the Maize Trust, said South Africa had lost up to 50% of the carbon in its cultivated soils over the previous century, with 7% to 10% going during every cultivation cycle in the main cropping areas. A 2011 review in the South African Journal of Science found about 58% of our topsoils hold under 0,5% organic carbon.

That is the yield ceiling dropping quietly while the fertiliser bill stays the same. Carbon holds soil structure together, stores water between rains, and feeds the microbes that make nutrients available to roots. Smith named the most pressing problem in soil conservation as the widespread lack of knowledge about soil biodiversity and biology. Six years on, that has not changed much.

The long-term science supports the concern. The Park Grass Experiment at Rothamsted, running over 150 years, found plots given inorganic fertiliser developed measurably weaker plant and microbial networks than unfertilised controls. Meta-analytic work reports that nitrogen fertilisation cuts arbuscular mycorrhizal root colonisation by roughly 15%. Those fungi are, in effect, an extension of the root system. Suppress them and the plant buys its phosphorus retail instead of wholesale.

This is the mechanism behind something farmers say without naming it: the land is tired. The land is not tired. The biology that used to do part of the nutritional work has thinned out, and nobody adjusted the programme.

Guessing is expensive

Roughly half the nitrogen applied to crops worldwide is never taken up by the plant, and on poorly structured, low-carbon soil that share gets worse. So a farmer can lose money in three directions at once: paying for nutrients the soil already had, paying for nutrients the soil cannot hold, and under-applying the one nutrient actually limiting the crop, because nobody measured.

The gap is awareness, not access. A 2026 survey of 115 smallholders in the North West found 84,35% had contact with extension services, yet a study of 294 farmers in Mbombela found 69,7% rated that service unsatisfactory.

What is available

Laboratory analysis. Provincial laboratories such as KZN DARD run a fertility panel at R170 a sample, total carbon at R220 and a full plant panel at about R230. Private accredited laboratories offer the same nationally.

Interpreted sampling and mapping. Agrisol, whose laboratory work we use at RegenZ, does grid sampling, soil physical mapping and satellite imagery through a mobile platform. Their own position bears repeating: "Unfortunately, the industry leads us to believe that there might be a bottled or bagged solution for every agricultural problem."

Biological inputs. Microbial inoculants, seaweed and amino-acid biostimulants, humic and fulvic products, compost and organic amendments. These support the biological side of nutrition rather than replacing the mineral side.

Extension and training. Grain SA's farmer development programme, provincial extension officers, commodity study groups. Free, and under-used.

The gap between a number and a decision

A bare laboratory result is a column of figures. It tells you your phosphorus is 12 mg/kg. It does not tell you whether that matters for cabbage on your soil, what to apply, or when. Most farmers who pay for a cheap test once and get a spreadsheet never test again, because nothing changed.

Closing that gap is what our own service is for. Through Beyond Soil Life™ we run the Agrisol laboratory work as a package, and the price includes the interpretation:

• Standard Soil Test, R414 including VAT. A Mehlich III basic panel: pH, Ca, Mg, K, P, S, Na, Fe, Mn, Cu, Zn and B. You post the sample and a RegenZ agronomist comes back with the report and recommendations for your soil and crop.
• SAP Analysis, R644 including VAT. A sap test on fresh leaf tissue, showing what is moving through the plant now rather than what is sitting in the soil. Good for catching a deficiency before it is visible and for tuning a foliar programme mid-season. It pairs with a soil test rather than replacing one.

The difference between R170 and R414 is about one and a half bags of LAN, and what it buys is someone who reads the result and tells you what to do about it. If you would rather use another laboratory and interpret it yourself, do that. The point is to stop buying inputs blind, not to buy them from us. If a paid test is not in this season's budget, our fertiliser programme service costs nothing.

Biology alongside fertiliser, not instead of it

Nobody credible is suggesting a smallholder drops synthetic fertiliser and hopes. Yield needs nutrients. The point is narrower: a programme built only on mineral inputs asks those inputs to do a job soil biology used to help with. Feeding the biology back in alongside the fertiliser is what lets the fertiliser work closer to its potential.

That is an efficiency argument, not an ideological one. Smith's ASSET Research assessment put conservation agriculture at roughly 1,6 million hectares by 2021, a quarter of the commercial cropping area, driven by commercial farmers themselves because the economics worked. The same economics apply on 2 ha.

Where to start

1. Test before you buy. One soil sample per block, before the fertiliser order goes in.
2. Test the plant too, once the crop is established.
3. Get the report explained. Confirm before you pay that interpretation is included.
4. Add one biological element rather than redesigning everything.
5. Record spend and yield per block, and retest every second or third season.

This is bookkeeping applied to soil, and it matters because the alternative is invisible. A farmer who over-applies phosphorus for six seasons never gets an invoice marked "wasted". The money is simply not there at the end.

For help reading a soil or sap report, email info@regenz.co.za or WhatsApp +27 60 319 8990.