The purpose of this study was to investigate the enabling environment within which smallholder farmers operate amidst the uneven playing field in the agricultural sector and the stringent demands of the consumer driven market. Most of the smallholder farmers utilise informal vegetable markets and these offer higher prices for the leafy vegetables. The study is based on data collected from 56 smallholder vegetable producers in Gauteng Province of South Africa. The study unveiled that the business environment has many challenges for the smallholder to competitively function in formal marketing channels, including poor upstream and downstream linkages and access to finance and technology. Access to inputs is a limiting factor to productivity with almost 41.7% of the farmers depending of government input handouts. The results of the logistic regression analysis shows a positive relationship between the choice of most utilised market and age, level of education, established arrangement with certain markets and sources of information on markets. This study concludes that there is need for multi-stakeholder engagements including organisations already working with smallholder farmers in order to ensure that there is no overlap of support services and hence indirectly ensuring wider coverage of farmer support. Both upstream and downstream linkages need to be promoted and this needs the intervention of the government through the support of organisations such as the national Department of Agriculture.

Cultivation of indigenous crops for food and nutritional security has emerged as a topic of interest in South Africa. Commercial cultivation of indigenous crops is promoted especially among smallholder farmers because of their nutritional value and their ability to adapt to marginal soil and climatic conditions. Support for commercial production of specific crops among farmers necessitates the need for optimum use of inputs in production. In order to evaluate optimum input use in production, this study established the profitability and production costs of one of the indigenised leafy vegetables in South Africa, Chinese cabbage, using gross margin analysis. Production costs and profitability evaluations are fundamental tools for analysing cash flow and investment options. The study was based on field trials on different levels of fertilizer (NPK application). The results of the study show that at low production level (10.1 t ha-1), gross income is less than total variable costs (TVC), resulting in a negative gross margin. A movement from low production to medium production (26.1 t ha-1) results in an increase in gross margin, from -R16,664.19 to R29,091.99. The highest gross margin of R82,807.07 is obtained at high production level (44.5 t ha-1). The study supports an interdisciplinary evaluation approach (agronomy and economics) when analysing field trials.