Welcome to this week’s edition of Frankly Speaking – our grower and stakeholder update bringing you the latest Seeka and Industry .
Last week the Seeka Growers Council met to approve the distribution to growers. There have been number of issues with this payment and the file had to be returned four times to Zespri for corrections. When you consider that kiwistart was completed over 10 weeks ago there is an issue with this process. The council raised this with Zespri and it was acknowledged that with another new person in this role this year it had not gone as smoothly as they would have liked. Growers are reminded that if you have a kiwistart dispute resulting from the issues with Eurofins performance during March please get these to your CRM so we can submit these to Zespri on your behalf before the Monday 31 August close off.
This week and next week are heavy load-out weeks for Seeka with over 1.1m trays being shipped in each week. The market feedback from Zespri remains quite positive in spite of ongoing COVID- 19 disruption. Europe, in particular, seems to be strong and the sales rates are proceeding to plan with comparable run rates and volumes left to sell as previous seasons. A market forecast is due from Zespri shortly and our Grower Entities team will convert this into an individualised forecast for you over the following two weeks. The presentation left us with an expectation that the market returns would see orchard gate returns per tray at the upper end of the range, subject to sales closing out well.
The Council also has replaced Debbie Oakley as their representative on KGI, with Louise Peters of Kerikeri. Debbie has sat on KGI for more than 5 years and stands down by rotation. Louise is a long time grower in Kerikeri who joined Seeka and Seeka Growers when Seeka purchased the business from T&G in Northland.
During the month, many of you will have received an email from Horticulture New Zealand (HNZ) asking for you to register and be eligible to vote in the current HNZ Director elections. We realised that under the current system, Seeka as the payer of the HNZ levy on your behalf, voted for you and as a result Seeka supplying growers only got one vote. As the entire Industry is probably captured the same way, the kiwifruit industry is under-represented as a result of the system. After all it can’t be just us. We contacted HNZ and provided them with the details of all of our supplying non-leased growers and as a result most of the growers supplying Seeka will get their own vote. That being the case, please register, get on line and vote – and vote for anyone in the kiwifruit industry (particularly if they are from Seeka) so we get our representation levels where they should be.
On the matter of voting – please also note that the KGI voting is live at the moment. The Seeka Growers Council raised that one of the resolutions is for growers to approve the KGI budget for the year ending December 2021. This budget is forecasting NZKGI to spend more money than it receives in 2021 by $145k at $1.848m. This compares to an operating surplus of $255k in 2018 and $52k in 2019. Seeka Growers Council pointed out that the higher than revenue expenditure is the result of increased discretionary non-core activities and that these should be reviewed, otherwise it would likely result in a future levy increase to fund the deficit. Seeka has not supported this resolution.
Seeka’s fruit quality continues to travel well, although fruit is not presenting as well as previous seasons, our fruit loss is low and our off-shore quality statistics comparable or better than the Industry.
To the numbers:
Kind regards,
Michael
Seeka Key
Contacts