Keeping watch of cereals for latest dramas
The markets have all been in a steady decline for the last couple of months with wheat now in the mid £160s, barley in the £130s and rape just above £300.
As far as cereals are concerned, consumption by feed mills has been significantly down over the winter due to many of them having bought maize last August when cereal prices were high and then finding that they couldn’t sell it back as cereal prices dropped, so they had to use the maize.
The real surprise has been barley. Bearing in mind that we had a much reduced harvested acreage and tonnage, you would have thought that the barley price would have remained very firm, but oddly buyers are very difficult to find even with a £30 per tonne gap between barley and wheat.
Fertiliser is the next conundrum and the ‘fert’ companies have surpassed themselves again with their marketing skills.
They seemed to have developed a strategy that throughout the autumn when nobody wants delivery of fertiliser, but they want to sell it, it is best to keep prices rocket high, only to drop the prices in March and April when usage is high.
This could be looking at the market very simply and I am not really taking into account a CF factory shutdown of three months in the autumn, but really a more realistic strategy needs to be adopted where the best prices are available before Christmas and then maybe we could avoid the annual spring delivery chaos.
Having said that the June/July buyers have had another cracking deal. On the winter wheat variety front KWS Exctase is looking to be a cracker and we are one of the few to have some. Get some booked while stocks last.
Events in the lambing shed went according to plan. We scanned at 163 per cent and we turned out at 163 per cent – not bad, hey?
In fact the finance department was so pleased with Mrs R that I took her off to Paris last week. Romance isn’t dead yet but the bank balance is having the kiss of life.
On Monday we sold lambs and that threw up some interesting stats. We have stuck to our usual plan and usual lambing dates but we are selling lambs a month earlier. I put that down to last year's awful weather.
This year our first lambs sold for £106.50 for 43s, a mere £48.40 less than last year… Maybe the Paris trip was a bit premature.
David Roberts, of G.O Davies (Westbury) Ltd grain merchant
