For more than a quarter of a century, Agri Securitas has turned private contributions into practical security infrastructure. Its records reveal both the reach of the effort and the size of the problem it is trying to solve.

Agri Securitas traces its origins to 1998, when President Nelson Mandela supported a Rural Safety Summit convened amid mounting concern over farm attacks and murders and challenged organised agriculture to become part of the solution. That intervention helped give rise to the Agri Securitas Trust Fund: a structured mechanism through which farming communities, business and the public could invest in rural safety alongside the state.

South Africa’s farms are businesses, homes and workplaces rolled into one. They are also difficult places to police. Production is scattered across large distances; police stations may be far away; communications can be patchy; and crime can occur kilometers from the nearest patrol. Rural safety therefore depends not only on policing, but on infrastructure.

That is the useful way to understand Agri Securitas, the rural-safety trust managed by AgriSA. Since 1999 it has channeled money from agriculture and corporate South Africa into camera networks, radio repeaters, drones, night-vision equipment, protective gear and other practical interventions. By 2022, more than R16m had been invested. In 2023, 32 projects reached roughly 6,760 farmers impacting many more farmworkers and community members.

In 2025, the trust approved R3.16m for 27 qualifying projects. Qualifying applications submitted by farmer associations totaled about R9.1m nearly three times the resources available. The problem is not a shortage of projects. It is a shortage of investment.

Investing in rural safety infrastructure

A camera pole can look like a small intervention. Connected to a control room and other cameras, it becomes part of a surveillance network. Radios link farmers and security structures often where mobile coverage is weak. Drones extend visibility across terrain that would otherwise take hours to patrol. Night-vision equipment changes what local structures can see after dark.

The 2025 cycle funded mainly CCTV infrastructure, radio communications, drones and night-vision equipment. Farmers associations also had to demonstrate collaboration with the South African Police Service and community structures. Investments were made across South Africa, across AgriSA’s affiliated membership and the wider agricultural sector.

This matters because rural security is often treated as a farm-by-farm problem. Increasingly it is a network problem. A farmer can buy a camera; a community can build a system. Agri Securitas bridges farming structures need and private contributions into shared infrastructure.

Building scale from small interventions

Agri Securitas has, over many years, attracted significant support from agribusinesses as well as from corporate players operating across the wider agricultural value chain. This has been complemented by a range of fundraising initiatives, with new mechanisms introduced on an ongoing basis to broaden the pool of capital available for rural-safety investment.

The more important development, however, is the way in which this funding is increasingly being allocated. Applications are not treated simply as isolated requests for equipment. They form part of a growing evidence base on where security gaps exist, what infrastructure is already in place, and where additional investment can strengthen an existing network rather than duplicate it.

Twenty-seven years on

Agri Securitas value lies in the space between national institutions and local action: converting private investment into infrastructure that communities can use. After 27 years, the opportunity is to turn a long-running programme into a larger platform for rural-safety investment, one that can show donors not merely what was funded, but where the gaps are, how projects connect and who benefits. There is no single piece of equipment that makes a countryside safe. But networks accumulate. One camera becomes a route; one radio becomes a communications system; and, over time, small interventions begin to resemble infrastructure.