Comment – Buckle up..

This week has been a quiet week, interspersed with short periods of extreme stress, no, not watching the news, but lambing time. Needless to say a sunny dry week is doing wonders for morale (unlike the news). Anyway mothers and lambs are doing well, so far.

Elsewhere I became curious about the impact of the war induced oil crisis in the middle east and decided to ask Google (other search engines are available) for some definite impact. In Australia for instance as seeding gets underway for many growers after harvest, the tanks are empty, and as a country reliant on imports for all fuels they reckon they are down to less than 30 days stocks. Reuters have the low down here.

Closer to home, most self respecting arable farmers may well be feeling smug about last autumns fertiliser order, but spare a thought for most of us poor old livestock and dairy farmers, who usually don’t order till the spring for either storage or cashflow reasons. The Guardian picked up on this a week or so ago.

I then got to musing about how long this could last, ie can we just wait for prices to drop before either a) filling the diesel tanks or b) ordering the fertiliser, the BBC cheered me up no end with this piece (spoiler alert – its going to be a while..)

In every cloud is a silver lining, so the saying goes. In this case, I suspect the economics of biodiesel and ethanol production have suddenly become much more attractive (especially given the relatively low commodity price of cereals currently), so the demand for grains (coupled with winter crop issues in the USA and elsewhere) may feed into increased demand and prices.

Watch this space, and have a good week.

Andy

PS Sorry for the blue hands, it’s the sheep marker!