The rooibos cycle

The mechanism in one paragraph

A planting yields nothing in its first year, rises to a peak in its second and third, and declines until the field rests. Growers decide this winter's planting on the returns of the last few years, so the leaf arrives years after the signal that called for it. When returns are low, replanting stalls; stock at processors runs down and cushions the shortfall for a while; then the crop falls short of use, stock reaches its working minimum, and the price rises sharply. High prices bring a planting rush, the new fields arrive together, stock piles up, and the farm-gate price falls further than the export price does. The ring below draws it; the charts after it show the last twenty years of it.

What has been observed, 2005 to 2025

These are the Almanac's documented and reconstructed series as inspected in October 2026. Years run on the horizontal axis; units are in each caption. Nothing here is a forecast.

Read the three together. The price trough around 2010 followed the big crops of 2007 to 2009 and the stock they built; the peak of 2017 and 2018 came after stock had been run down to a low point; the large crops of 2019 to 2022 rebuilt stock and the price fell again. The grower's share of the export value falls when stock rises and recovers when it is drawn down, which is why growers, with the least cash to carry it, end up carrying the stock cycle. Weather is layered on top: a dry winter cuts the crop, and a failed planting season cuts the crops three years out.

The lag, drawn

How the cycle could be made more resilient

The Almanac proposes, and this library reads as worth testing, a set of changes that distinguish three different actors. None is a recommendation to any individual to buy, sell, hold or plant.

For growers, operational

• Cost the whole cycle, not a mature year: establishment, the thin young and old years, and the rest years. A full-cycle cost per kilogram is the number to compare with any return.
• Keep field records that let replanting be planned on evidence: age of each block, its yield history, and the land resting between rotations.
• Any case for holding leaf needs its financing, loss and storage cost written down; any case for planting needs full-cycle economics, not the current year's return.

For buyers and suppliers, contractual

• Multi-year supply arrangements for growers who replant, so that planting decisions rest on more than the last two seasons' returns.
• A published reference that moves with the export market, so that both sides can plan against the same number.
• Stock bought into a stated range in a glut and released in a shortage, under published rules rather than discretion.

For the industry and researchers, transparency

• An independent survey of full-cycle cost by farm size, region and system, on realised returns, so that argument about base years gives way to a shared number.
• An audited stock count that includes farm stock, replacing a reconstruction with a measurement.
• Annual planting and replanting data, so that the supply that will arrive in three years is visible now.
• A grower voice in the bodies that publish and interpret these figures.

Whether any shared pricing arrangement is lawful is a question for competition law and for the bodies that administer it; the Almanac notes that growers and processors may not agree prices or volumes among themselves without an exemption or an independent body. This library makes no legal finding and no allegation about how the cycle has been managed; it describes a mechanism that the data makes visible and the research that would let everyone see the same facts.