Today on the Durban fresh market: is your crop oversupplied, and where is its price heading next? The floor's stock is measured against its own history, the price against its own run — no vibes, just the measured thing. Want it for your own crop? get a call for your crop.
Each dot is a commodity today. Right means more stock than usual; down means prices are falling. Click a dot for detail.
| Price, last 90 days |
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Days of stock is stock on hand divided by units sold per day, averaged over the last 5 trading days. It is ranked against the same commodity's history, so apples sitting on cold-store stock are not compared with lettuce.
Price change compares R/kg over the last 5 trading days with the 20 trading days before that. R/kg is total value sold divided by total kg sold, so a shift toward cheaper grades shows up as a fall.
Signal names follow what the flags actually do, measured on a year of this market's data (measured on a year of daily data; the test itself is documented in our methods notes): Slide risk — stock high but price still rising: the one forward warning, prices fell within 10 trading days more often than chance after it. Glut building — stock piling up, price steady. Tight — stock in the bottom fifth and price up. Good window — low stock, steady price; prices have tended to rise from here. Recovering (supplies high or prices soft) — these fire after a ≥5% price fall has already happened and mostly mark bottoms, so they are statuses, not warnings.
| Flag | Days flagged | Median next-10-day move | Fell >1% | Base rate | Reading |
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What market information does and does not do. The published evidence (academic and policy studies) is that market information reduces risk and price dispersion and helps farmers start selling at all — it rarely raises the average price by itself. Group selling and joining with other farmers is what converts better timing into better received prices.
Market realities the numbers can't see: agents negotiate commission per farmer (small consignments often pay more); "reserved" stock can sit on the floor before sale, which at times distorts the stock-on-hand the signals read (Fresh Produce Market Inquiry, 2024/25).
Break-even is the Durban price per kg a farmer needs to cover the variable costs of growing and packing the crop (seed, fertiliser, chemicals, labour, packaging, fuel, repairs) plus 12.5% market and agent fees, from the Land Bank's 2025/26 enterprise budgets. It leaves out land, finance, overheads and transport to Durban, so the true break-even is higher. Below it, growers lose cash on every kilogram they send. Budgets are for a typical commercial farm; yields vary a lot by region and grower. Low-confidence budgets are marked with *.
This is one market of nineteen. Durban tracks the eastern-corridor towns closely and moves with, but not ahead of, Johannesburg and Tshwane (measured across twelve years of national quarterly data); national price leadership sits in Gauteng. Prices elsewhere on this market's data and the national quarterly series are ingested separately and feed the planned national context view.
Farming calendar plots each crop's kg-weighted market price by month against its break-even (red = below, green = well above). * is the best month, H marks harvest peaks — months where traded volume is at or above the crop's own median — and P the plant window, that peak pulled back by an estimated lead time from planting to first harvest. Lead times are horticultural norms, so treat the grid as a planting guide and use the day-to-day signals to time each consignment.