South African agriculture needs more than good policy. It needs institutions that connect local realities to decisions, and decisions back to the people they affect.

AgriSA began as a national farmers’ federation in 1904, after calls for a united organisation dating to 1896. In 2026, that history is an asset only if it helps solve a contemporary problem: how to make a fragmented food system hear what is happening on the ground, and act on it.

The federation’s reach gives it a distinctive place in that system. Provincial affiliates, commodity organisations, corporate members, local associations, community interventions and farmers’ halls connect national policy debates to working agricultural communities. Digital infrastructure, with appropriate governance, is now adding another layer: a way to capture and organise local intelligence so that individual problems can become evidence of wider patterns.

That matters because agriculture’s constraints rarely sit within one department, one sphere of government or one value chain. A failed road, a delayed water-use decision, a safety threat, or an unworkable labour process can affect production, investment, and livelihoods across regions at once. The institutions expected to respond are under pressure, making collaboration and coordination more important.

BFAP’s 2026 Baseline brings this interdependence into focus. Its long-term outlook asks how an export-led growth strategy can be reconciled with food security and affordability. Agricultural policy alone cannot answer the question. It reaches into trade, infrastructure, energy, labour, water, land, public administration and household purchasing power.

AgriSA’s five Centres of Excellence, Economics and Trade, Labour, Land and Development, Natural Resources, and Rural Safety, is helping to organise that response. Their value lies not simply in producing policy positions, but in connecting member experience to analysis, building alliances across institutions and supporting practical interventions. Their success is measured by whether a concern raised locally can travel through that process and return as a visible improvement.

This is a broader conception of lobbying. A submission or high meeting may influence a decision, but influence can also mean assembling reliable evidence, bringing public and private actors around a shared problem, testing a response and reporting back to the communities affected. AgriSA cannot replace the responsibilities of government. It can help institutions understand the problem, coordinate across boundaries, and work with the broader network of organised business and research partners to learn from and influence what happens on the ground.

The approach is already showing in several areas. AgriSA has brought agricultural evidence into NERSA’s inquiry into electricity charges; the regulator’s report remains a consultation draft, so the process is still open. On corporate visas, the organisation has used member experience to press for a more workable system and address blockages.

In rural safety, its recently announced partnership with the Business Against Crime South Africa (BACSA) and the Institute for Security Studies aims to put evidence behind collaboration with farming communities and law-enforcement partners. Similar approaches have been rolled out on road maintenance and other infrastructure challenges. These are different issues, but they illustrate the same institutional method: connect experience to evidence, and evidence to action.

The opportunity is national in scale because the underlying network already is. A federation with local relationships, sector expertise, and digital intelligence is helping agriculture respond to problems that cross municipal, provincial, and national boundaries and build partnerships that include organised agriculture and broader business, government, and rural communities.

The test is not how many meetings AgriSA and its affiliates attends or how many policy papers it publishes. It is whether the system becomes more capable of solving problems: whether a member concern is detected early, credibly evidenced, carried to the right decision-makers, and followed through to a result people can see.

South African agriculture’s future will depend on more than farms producing well. It will depend on alliances able to make a complex food system work. AgriSA’s history gives it reach; its task now is to turn that reach into a dependable connection between the farm gate and the decisions that shape the sector.