Farmer's Weekly

Improving beef yield through crossbreeding

Like too many other black farmers in South Africa, David Rakgase of Rakgase Farms in Northam, Limpopo, has spent decades being refused the right to buy the state land he had been living and working on for decades.

The 74-year-old Rakgase, who runs a beef farming operation and also farms goats and pigs, started farming in 1991 on land he leased from the former Bophuthatswana.

After 1994, he continued to lease the land from the agriculture department. In 2002, when the department’s Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) policy came into being, allowing farmers the option to purchase land they were renting from the state,

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