Week ended Sunday 6 September 2020Welcome to this week’s edition of Frankly Speaking – our grower and stakeholder update bringing you the latest Seeka and Industry . It has been a relatively quiet week as the teams concentrate on managing the inventory and pushing through to the end. The SunGold fruit shipping programme is nearing completion with six weeks remaining and Seeka having just under 1m trays of fruit remaining in store to load out. The SunGold organic programme has another five weeks of shipping planned. Hayward conventional shipping is planned for another 10 weeks and the Hayward organic category has nine weeks of shipping remaining. The teams are focussing on the fruit, assessing fruit condition, prioritising inventory for load out based on the assessments, and also checking that individual growers are not over exposed when we get to week 40 for Hayward. Seeka’s fruit quality continues to travel well, although fruit is not presenting as well as previous seasons, our fruit loss is very low and our off-shore quality statistics remain comparable or better than the industry. The industry continues to discuss potential changes to the taste system for the 2021 season. The concern with the old system was that it encouraged growers to continue to hold fruit on the vines and repeatedly test the maturity area to maximise the result from the dry matter test. The proposed changes will cap the dry matter payment at pre-determined TZG level. This means that if a TZG score is greater than the cap value the fruit would not earn additional taste income. For SunGold the cap will be set by size. There has been also been a proposal put forward for a payment to be made for “storage utility”. This is an incentive for main season fruit of $0.65 per tray for a final maturity clearance average pressure of ≥ 6.0 kgf decreasing to $0.00 per trays as average pressure declines to ≤ 5.5 kgf. The purpose of this incentive is to encourage growers to harvest fruit before it becomes too mature, this is more of a risk in a low dry matter year. Our view has been to support the capping of the taste payment and not to support the pressure payment. The mechanism for rewarding for storage utility is the time model not the introduction of an incentive based on a sample taken from the maturity area pre harvest. Our teams have also been working through the arduous process of tendering for the provision of services for maturity services to the industry. Unfortunately the process seems to be no less complicated than in years previous to this. And we are scratching our heads about whether commercially it makes sense to participate. If we are successful, we will have to invest, find extra labour in a market we already know to be short, and put our people under significant stress for little reward. We already know that labour will be tight next year with uncertainty around the access to and supply of RSE workers from the Pacific. Thank you to all of you who have contributed to support Vaetasi’s wife and daughter back in Samoa. Your generosity has raised over $17,500 for the benefit of the family. We will update you on the final fund when we get there and are talking to Mr Apple about both their and our contribution. If you would like to contribute, please click the link here. To the numbers: Kind regards Michael |
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