For the last two weeks our oldest son Brendon has been on “holiday” from his job as a diesel mechanic at D&E. His help for two weeks certainly made our life easier and we have been able to keep up with the orders as well as the invoicing which is a rarity. Though not quite so easy for the freight companies and delivery times did stretch out a bit more than normal. The worst being our customer in Hokitika who got bumped by a week!

Thank you to those customers who when paying by internet use their proper customer code or invoice number. Makes our job of reconciling payments with the correct invoices much easier when we have the correct info, as it can be quite challenging especially where some farms have names that are very close to another farm or when there are multiple farms paid from the one account.
In our first newsletter for this season I wrote about the volatility of the soy price and I was hopeful that it would fall in price. And it did fall in price and we contracted enough to last until mid-October at $630 per tonne however since then China has been actively buying and the price has risen and I am now paying $840 per tonne. Hard to make sense of it, Fridays report state that China currently has 15.8 million tonnes of US soybeans waiting to be shipped.

On the positive side we are now buying wheat on the free market which is cheaper than our contracted wheat. These savings are helping us hold the High Octane price where it is. But more positively the Low Protein price will drop by $20 per tonne effective from November 1st. These savings are due to its higher wheat content, lower soy content and we have also made a couple of changes to the micro ingredients for the Low Protein making it more of a finisher diet.

Prices effective from November 1st 2020
High Octane Aoraki Calf Meal 40 x 25kg $748 + GST ex our yard
Low Protein Aoraki Calf Meal 40 x 25kg $698 + GST ex our yard

We are now very low on pallets, please stack up any of our pallets that you have (plus any others you want gone) and ask the freight company to pick them up next time they are in. We continue with our policy of using recycled pallets, I am of the opinion that to have purposely built pallets and then charge for them would cause a lot more administration and arguments (keen to avoid both) however we do rely on you to send them back.

Kind Regards
Ken Buckingham