Ask what it costs to plant a hectare of maize in South Africa and you get two very different answers depending on what you mean. The whole cost, seed through harvest insurance, runs into the tens of thousands of rand: Grain SA's own 2025/26 budget for irrigated maize in Limpopo totals R44 525 a hectare. The cost of the machinery work itself, the actual passes across the land, is a much smaller number and the one most farmers are really asking about when they are deciding whether to plough again this year or hire someone.
Those Grain SA numbers are solid but they really don’t capture what’s happening on the ground right now with input costs blowing out and yield risk up because of water and the weather patterns shifting. I know a few guys running maize in the Meredale area who are basically break-even or worse at current prices even when they get decent rain, and they’re carrying debt from the last two seasons of undershooting yields. The actual ploughing and planting pass is maybe a quarter of that full budget, but if you’re financing the seed and fertiliser upfront because you don’t have the cash reserves, the real cost to you is much higher because you’re carrying those inputs against whatever grain price you can hope for in six months’ time.