Commercialization of smallholder agriculture in South Africa is underpinned by reforms to improve livestock off-take in communal areas and engage smallholder farmers with formal markets. To achieve this, Custom Feeding Programmes (CFPs) were established to improve the condition of communal cattle prior to their sale into formal markets and to ‘systematise’ the informal marketing of cattle in communal areas by enabling participants to achieve higher informal market prices. We evaluate the sustainability of eight CFPs located in Eastern Cape Province in terms of their ability to add value to smallholder cattle production and encourage market participation. Communities with CFPs achieved a 16.6% mean cattle off-take rate, substantially higher than in most communal systems. Furthermore, cattle sold through CFPs attained a 17% higher mean selling price than those sold through other marketing channels. However, these benefits were mainly realized by better-off farmers with larger cattle herds and greater ability to transport animals to and from CFPs. More marginalized farmers, particularly women, had low participation. CFPs also face challenges to their sustainability, including inconsistent feed and water supplies, poor infrastructure and high staff turnover. Key to enhancing participation in CFPs, will be improving the way they are supported and embedded within communities.

Efforts to exploit the central roles of cattle to drive agriculture and rural development in low-income countries recorded limited success owing to their narrow focus on modernizing and commercializing low-input cattle farming. Most programs failed to take cognizance of the heterogeneous range of complex relationships between the environmental, economic, social and institutional challenges that limit low-input cattle farming. The current qualitative literature review evaluates the environmental, economic and social sustainability delivery impacts of the leading cattle development programs in the low-input farming sector in South Africa using a holistic systems approach. A mixed method procedure involving stratified sampling was used to allocate local and international-based programs while, purposive sampling was used to select programs with a wider scale of operation. The review then draws on the crosscutting key constraints emerging from the case studies to provide a better grounding for subsequent sustainability sensitive recommendations. Local-based cattle development programs advanced more market-led interventions while, their international-based counterparts had more interventions including, soil and rangeland improvement. The narrow focus by both local and international developmental programs is inadequate to address a wide array of environmental, economic, social, technical and institutional challenges faced by low-input cattle producers in South Africa.

In South Africa, cooperatives are the primary institutions through which delivery of governmental agricultural support programmes for rural communities is realised. Although these cooperatives are governed by clear national guidelines that encourage transparency and accountability to their membership, in reality their ability to realise this may be compromised by an imperative to achieve service delivery in an environment of limited governmental support. Drawing on empirical research undertaken at five agricultural cooperatives in the Elliot area of Eastern Cape Province, we examine the extent to which they are able to balance democratic function with effective programme delivery. We show that the limited capacity of local government to reach out to rural areas promotes heavy competition between cooperatives for government programmes, resulting in a highly skewed distribution of benefits determined primarily by how effectively each can ‘reach up’ to local service providers to secure them. This encourages cooperatives to elect powerful actors to represent them because they are perceived to have the greater political ‘connectedness’ required to access these benefits. However, these powerful actors are often less accountable to membership and therefore more likely to disburse benefits to suit their own vested interests. We suggest that, under current conditions, the process of creating effective and legitimate cooperatives must balance strong leadership with a high degree of accountability and transparency to ensure that benefits are disbursed as widely and appropriately as possible to members. Separating executive, judicial and legislative power structures associated with the securing and disbursement of resources to ensure processes are transparent, might be the most practical way of achieving this. Ultimately, if the capacity of the state is strengthened to enable them to ‘reach down’ to cooperatives more effectively, the need to vest leadership in powerful actors and risk compromising accountability and egalitarian service delivery, might be reduced.

Poor productivity in smallholder farming systems has necessitated research on the potential of crop–livestock integration to sustainably improve productivity. The study hypothesized that improvement in individual agronomic and livestock systems and synergistic utilization of by-products of either system increases productivity, profitability and integration. Smallholder farming households were classified into: old and resource endowed (OR); part time (PT); and young, risk-taking and enthusiastic (YRE) following a survey conducted in Murehwa and Goromonzi districts of Zimbabwe. Crop–livestock systems’ integration scenarios were developed for each farmer category. Expression of crop–livestock integration in physical terms, e.g., kg ha⁻¹, can be complex and confounding, hence the expression of integration in monetary values. Baseline scenario results indicate thatORhad the highest crop–livestock integration of $3981 compared withPTandYREdespiteORhaving the lowest manure usage compared withPTandYREfarmers. Moreover,ORhad the least legume yields of <800 compared with 3530 kg ha⁻¹inYREfarmers. Subsequent crop–livestock integration scenarios increased maize grain yields by at least 50%, thus increasing profitability to $1210, $3230 and $3100 yr⁻¹for mucuna, cowpea and groundnut, respectively. Total income increased by 135, 132 and 101% translating to $9880, $2960 and $6290 yr⁻¹inOR,PTandYREfarmers, respectively. Crop–livestock integration therefore has the potential to improve smallholder crop and livestock productivity, variable with socio-economic status.