Frankly Speaking – Week 39 Update
Please accept this Grower Update to the end of week 39 [Sunday 28 September].
The kiwifruit season is in the home straight and we were down to around 880k Hayward conventional trays and 6.5k trays of Hayward organic in store at the beginning of this week. At the same time the avocado season is getting into gear and we are now about 20% of the way through our harvest.
Thank you to those growers who attended the recent Seeka Growers Annual Meeting – it was a great evening. The meeting, dinner and entertainment were all exceptional and the after-dinner speech by Hon Tony Ryall was truly memorable. We have had many excellent speakers at the Growers Dinner and he was right up there with the best. At that meeting Malcolm Cartwright indicated that, while he was still available to be a councillor, he would step down as SG Chairman at the next Council meeting. Malcolm has held the role for more than 12 years attending more than 150 Seeka Growers Meetings on your behalf. Thank you Malcolm for your service. The Council will go through a formal process of electing a new Chairman – something which is a little unusual for us as we have not had to do it for a long time.
There are a number of important initiatives currently underway in the industry. The consultation stage of KISP is nearing completion with submissions due by 5pm on 15th October. Your Seeka Growers Council will consider its response on the 7th October and will send you their thoughts in time for you to take them into account, should you wish to make your own submission. Seeka, the corporate, being one of the largest growers will also make a submission. This project has wide ranging proposals and already a number of you have expressed concerns about a range of issues and the process itself. If you have concerns then you should express them in a submission. It will be hard to criticise later decisions if you have not made your own views known. You can of course copy the Seeka Growers submission if you agree with it.
Also, very recently, a Grower Class Action was announced. Details about this action can be found at their website www.thekiwifruitclaim.org . If you owned an orchard at the time of the Psa outbreak and subsequently suffered a loss because of Psa then I encourage you to find out more about this initiative. You need to register your interest by 24th October 5pm.
Finally we are seeing and receiving a lot more notifications about Psa symptoms on orchards particularly in Hayward males. With this in mind our pollen milling operation is being prepared for the coming flowering in order to provide growers with a cost-effective pollination option.
The statistics as at End Wk 39
Hayward
Seeka Packed: 17,054,522 trays Industry 69,798,811 trays [Seeka 24.4%]
Average reject rate: 17.69% Average size 33.12
Seeka fruit loss to date 1.99% Industry fruit loss to date: 1.24%
In store 880,366 trays
On order week 40 158,149 trays
On order week 41 267,390 trays
The green pool balance is currently at positive $692,453 [$0.04/ submit tray or $0.05/time pool tray] at the end of week 31. Using 2013 rates the pool would be positive $1.6m or $0.12/submit tray.
SeekaFresh
SeekaFresh programs to both retail and wholesale are proceeding very well despite the challenges of a high dollar. We are about half way through our Australian program. The market remains a little volatile with the new entrant to the market presenting challenges in matching supply with demand or more particularly over-supplying demand. Seeka’s approach has been to deliver a high quality and reliable product flow to our retail channel supported by targeted complimentary marketing. We strive to match supply and demand. SeekaFresh has been innovative with programs and pack-types to deliver our sponsors fruit that their consumers want to buy. We are regularly in the market and to date have been satisfied with the presentation and quality. Simply put we have got to make it easy for our customers to want to buy our fruit and so far so good. Our returns to date are slightly better than last year and we are expecting some upside in our SeekaFresh forecast.
Grower Share Plan
Thank you – the allotment has now closed for the 2014 issue of shares and we pretty much got a complete response from our growers. Next year you will not need to go through this rigmarole and we can just allot the shares. Your notices will be sent to you next week.
Kind regards
Michael
Seeka Key
Contacts