Nervous times as fertiliser silly season approaches
The grain markets over the last month have become distinctly livelier.
New crop wheat and barley have moved upwards with wheat now in the upper £140s for the autumn and barley in the £130s.
This is due to dry weather in the USA and the news that Vivergo and Ensus will both be buyers in the autumn. Between those two and a reduced acreage of wheat, it all adds up to us having a much-reduced exportable surplus which leaves us in the precarious position of relying on good harvests. If for some reason mother nature decides to send us a drought then we could be in for interesting times.
We are heading into the silly season in the fertiliser market and all merchants are waiting nervously for the new prices to come out.
I would be very surprised if the campaign started at the same level as last year and I would suspect that it will probably be in the £190s, but fertiliser manufacturers are a breed unto themselves - so we can expect anything!
With the very late spring, or should I say our jump from winter into summer, this has led to a very late fertiliser spring campaign, so that would suggest that plenty of tonnes are being sold and so there shouldn’t be the need for the fertiliser campaign to kick off until June, but as I said…
Urea has been fluctuating with the currency and at time of writing, that is trading at around £210 on farm. Last year ammonium nitrate was trading at significantly higher levels on the continent than it was here.
This week the G.O Davies team head to Four Crosses for The Royal Welsh Grassland Event on May 16. We have a stand at the event and Philip Cosgrave, Yara National Grassland Specialist, will be joining us, so if you are there please pop in to see us for a cup of tea and one of Mrs R’s cakes!
That reminds me of lambing. We sold our first lambs last week for £154! Unbelievable, and never before have we been selling lambs while waiting for the last two to lamb. Why is that? Well the good news is that our new pedigree yearling Beltex tup is fertile, but the bad news is no one is owning up to putting him in with the barren ewes!
David Roberts, of G.O. Davies grain merchants of Westbury
