Time for a campaign to back British merchants?
The grain markets have had a fairly volatile few weeks, but I suspect if you drew a straight line across a graph of prices there would be little change from the beginning of August to the end of September.
Having said that, oilseed rape has been very exciting and almost reached £330 for September before crashing back last week under pressure from currency.
Farmers have been reluctant sellers of grain but there is still enough coming forward to keep the market satisfied. Nationally there is a distinct advantage for farmers living in the North East around the ensus plant as they are sucking up wheat and giving those farmers a £3 advantage over the rest of the country. Milling premiums are good with demand for all groups of wheats, depending on how they test.
The fertiliser market has rocketed up and is now the far side of £220 delivered, so those who bought early can pat themselves on the back! I wonder if some of the senior management of the fertiliser companies are quite so happy as they could have increased their income significantly by conducting a more responsible marketing campaign. It will be interesting to see how the early Nitrogen market is conducted next summer.
I always like to write these columns and leave the readers (if there are any) with a cause for thought. So here we go… Recently we have seen another local company being taken over by a conglomerate with foreign backing, which is always a shame to see. We now have a lot of our larger merchants either totally owned by either the Americans, Chinese or Irish, plus a few other nationalities.
I am a member of the NFU and totally agree with their campaign to back British farmers. If we look at that from a different angle, then maybe we should be holding a campaign to back British-owned merchants. For those of you that do already...thank you.
And I haven’t even mentioned Brexit yet.
David Roberts, of G.O. Davies (Westbury) Ltd, a privately-owned grain merchant operating across Wales and the West Midlands.
