‘n Boer maak ’n plan

The Afrikaans saying “’n Boer maak ’n plan” is often translated as “a farmer makes a plan”, but in South Africa it means far more than that. It speaks to a particular way of dealing with reality: when things don’t go according to plan wait for ideal conditions. You find another way. You adapt. You make it work. It’s a phrase shaped by experience rather than optimism, and it carries a quiet confidence rooted in necessity, confidence back by your own skills.

This attitude has grown out of South Africa’s agricultural history. Farming there has never been easy or predictable. Rainfall is uneven, droughts are frequent, distances are long, and infrastructure has often been unreliable. Over generations, farmers and those working alongside the supply chain with them learned that success depended less on perfect systems and more on the ability to respond when those systems failed. Something breaks, a delivery is late, the weather turns, markets change — and you deal with it.

That mindset remains deeply relevant today. Climate variability has intensified, and droughts such as those experienced between 2015 and 2018 forced producers across the country to rethink how they farm. The response was not dramatic or ideological. Instead, it was practical and incremental: changing planting dates, switching varieties, repairing and adapting irrigation systems, sharing water infrastructure, and relying on experience to manage risk. Research by South African institutions such as the Agricultural Research Council and the Water Research Commission consistently shows that farmers respond to stress through steady adaptation rather than radical overhaul.

The same approach is visible in how the sector has handled energy instability. Load shedding has become a defining feature of South African business life, and agriculture has been particularly exposed. Cold storage, milling, irrigation and logistics all depend on electricity. When power supply became unreliable, farmers and agribusinesses did not wait for perfect policy solutions. Packhouses invested in generators despite rising fuel costs. Farmers shared backup systems. Processing schedules were adjusted around outage timetables. Many operations began installing solar or biogas systems not as a branding exercise, but simply to keep running.

What stands out is how rarely these responses are described as innovation. Most people involved simply call it “making a plan”. The phrase comes up again and again in conversations across the value chain — from farmers and investors to truck drivers and exporters. It reflects an expectation that conditions will be difficult, and that competence is measured by how you respond when things go wrong.

This practical resilience also shows in South Africa’s participation in global agricultural markets. Export industries like fruit, wine and grains operate under tight margins, strict quality standards and volatile logistics. When bottlenecks developed at ports or shipping routes were disrupted, exporters did not retreat from markets. They rerouted shipments, renegotiated contracts, adapted packaging and invested in better monitoring of quality and timing.

At the smallholder level, the same logic applies, often under even tougher conditions. In rural areas of Limpopo, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, small-scale farmers facing erratic rainfall and limited access to finance have diversified crops, staggered planting times, reused materials, and relied on shared knowledge within their communities. Academic research published in journals such as Sustainability and Agriculture documents how these farmers blend traditional practices with selective use of modern inputs, guided by experience rather than theory.

What ’n Boer maak ’n plan ultimately captures is not stubborn independence or romantic self-reliance. It describes a learned adaptability — an acceptance that things will go wrong, that plans will need to change, and that progress depends on practical responses rather than perfect conditions. It helps explain why South African agribusiness continues to function, and in many cases compete globally, operating in an environment one could describe as rather dysfunctional.

The saying endures because it reflects everyday reality. It is not a motivational slogan and it offers no guarantee of success. Some plans fail. Some seasons are lost. But the expectation remains that another plan will be made. In that sense, it is less about confidence than about responsibility: if you want things to work, you engage, you adjust, and you carry on.

In a world where uncertainty is becoming the norm rather than the exception, the quiet pragmatism behind “’n Boer maak ’n plan” feels increasingly relevant. It reminds us that resilience is rarely dramatic. More often, it is built through persistence, improvisation and the steady work of making things function when conditions refuse to cooperate.