Data note: Spatializing South African agricultural censuses, 1918–2017

ABSTRACT

Agriculture is an intrinsically spatial production process. Where on the landscape agriculture occurs affects the environmental (e.g., soil, water, climate) factors that have large output and production risk consequences. The location of agriculture also has substantial logistic, policy and market performance implications. To facilitate analysis of the spatial dynamics of agriculture, we developed a collection of new ADM 2 boundary files whose geographical dimensions and naming standards map directly to the 18 agricultural censuses that report farm inputs, outputs and related statistics for South African agriculture over the period 1918–2017. The statistical aggregates – representing Magisterial and Municipal Districts –, changed in number, area size and boundaries over time. Cross-referencing these changing statistical aggregates to our newly digitised census boundaries, is an essential step for any geospatial assessment of the causes and (productivity and environmental) consequences associated with the changing physical footprint of South African agriculture over the past century.

KEYWORDS:

• Administrative boundary
• agricultural census
• South African

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the late Frikkie Liebenberg for his contribution to this paper by sourcing various maps and other relevant documents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Software

We used ESRI ArcGIS products for georeferencing and digitising historical maps (ArcMap 9.x – 10.x).

Notes

1 Namibia, formerly known as South West Africa, gained independence from South Africa on March 21, 1990, after being administered by South Africa since the end of World War I (Encyclopedia Britannica 2021).

2 Geographically small, multipart polygons were evident in other years through digitisation errors or represented non-agriculturally relevant islands (e.g., Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town). In these instances, the polygons were deleted from our boundary files given they were inconsequential for the subsequent joins with the agricultural statistics data.

 

Additional information

Funding

This paper was prepared with financial support from Stellenbosch University and the University of Minnesota (Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station project MIN-14-171 and MNDrive funding to the GEMS Informatics Center), with additional support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded by way of the HarvestChoice project (Project ID: OPPGD1450).