Earlier this year I visited most of the customers that purchased 5 tonne or more from us in 2012. These visits can be as short as 2 minutes or as long as an hour. I even did a Raspberry cream bun run to the West Coast on a Sunday.

We did sneak away in August and at long last we got to see Pink live. Awesome. The winds in September certainly stumped us and gave us our longest power cut since 1975.

Half way through November the soybean importers ran out of stock so we stopped making High Octane to make our soybean meal last until the next shipment arrived. We now have plenty of soybean meal and High Octane calf meal is available again.

The raw material prices have continued to go against us and while the calf meal price should have gone up every month I decided I just didn’t want to go there. So the prices remain the same for the third month in a row. It was a struggle to find peas all season and we have now seemingly exhausted all supplies and have had to look at alternatives. After lots of interesting research I choose lentils to replace peas rather than broad beans or faba beans.

Yet again we run out of bags and Daniel had to make a new stencil (Daniel made the Hi O stencil at age 11) and as the printed bags come from China they take a while to turn up. The temptation is to buy heaps for next year the flip side is if I do buy heaps I will possibly have $10-20k of bags still in the shed at the end of the season.

In October and November with our peak production up 30% from last year often our yard just didn’t seem big enough. What this photo doesn't show is that Interfreight is also towing a flat deck trailer and there is another truck and trailer waiting around the corner.

We always enjoy getting positive feedback from the customers and I always think I must get out and take more photos of customers in action. It has been a tricky season however the end result we are all after is happy healthy calves.

We thank you for your support during 2013 and we wish you all a Merry Christmas and a prosperous 2014.

We are no longer open all day or every weekday, however we continue to make calf meal and one of us is generally not too far away, just ring or text before you visit. I look forward to getting on the road again in 2014 and catching up with as many of you as possible.

Cheers

Ken Buckingham