Our Entities Team [the team that manages your money through Seeka Growers Limited] has been putting in the hours to deliver the first individualised Orchard Gate Return forecast for each of our supplying orchards by maturity area. This forecast is now on its way to you. It’s quite a mathematical exercise to complete and understand all the assumptions that must be made. This year it has been made a little more complicated with a number of inconsistencies within Zespri’s own forecast leading to a number of revisions in the numbers and some fundamental uncertainties within the Hayward pools, sales rates and market returns.
Seeka’s approach to the forecasts that we prepare for our growers is to try and give you a fair indication of the returns that can be reasonably expected from your crop for the year. We do not try to overstate the forecast understanding the effect that this can have on our growers and we do not try and prepare the forecast as a procurement tool – “look how much more we are earning than the competition”. Our forecasts tend to increase over time rather than decrease irrespective of the changes in forecast issued by Zespri as normally we have predicted those changes.
In the case of SunGold, the forecast is reasonably straight forward. The selling season is well in the home straight and the performance is good. In the case of Hayward conventional, however we are cautious about the outlook, and the inconsistent numbers in the Zespri forecast. We have taken a very conservative approach in arriving at the forecast numbers included in your packs and reduced the initial forecast for those uncertainties in arriving at your forecast.
In the case of Hayward organic, the year on year market returns are very low and these are reflected in the forecast along with a lower taste profile. I would note that in previous years the very low early Zespri forecasts for Hayward organic have been backed up by substantial improvements. Let’s wait and see.
Our Seeka Growers Annual Meeting is being held this Friday at Baypark at 4pm followed by dinner and guest speaker Nadia Lim. Please RVSP with Annie at Annie.Moir@seeka.co.nz if you would like to attend. All are welcome.
To the numbers [as at midnight 18 September]
See you Friday!
Regards
Michael
Seeka Key
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