Hard News: Five further thoughts
446 Responses
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
...it never rains, but it Hayley's
You saw it first at Hard News
That is comprehensive!
a whey with the theories...
on the Demand side
is anyone working to weaponise milk?</hopefully a bad joke>
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Farmer Green, in reply to
That is comprehensive!
Going by past episodes, the effect should hit Auckland about 18 months from now.
But this time , it appears that the malaise will not be as short-lived as the previous episodes. -
It seems as though Joe Average has a pretty good handle on what is going down.
Her's a comment from NBR :-" We have a lot of headwinds blowing in our direction now with China slowing dramatically (take whatever their official reports say, haircut the positives by 50% and magnify the negatives by 2x and that probably comes close to reality), and given that instead of addressing our major fiscal handicap, extreme household debt, when interest rates were low and we had a window to save, we have instead elected to double down on the housing ponzi market just as the global interest rate cycle begins to trend up after 5 years of central bank rescue financing begins to end.
I don't see any surpluses for at least a decade given the structural issues we face and the way inflation will soon take hold here (on a low NZD) just as growth tails off following the dairy bust. Stagflation anyone?
But then again...Everything is Awesome!"I guess that we're
"pretty relaxed about that". :-) -
Kyle Matthews, in reply to
The majority of California’s energy is already provided for by solar power stations
Not even close to that. In 2010 it was 53% Natural Gas, 14% from all renewables.
Server farms would provide an ideal replacement for the smelter when it closes.
We've discussed this before on the site. From memory the number of server farms that you could plant in Southland to use all the available power is so ridiculous, that it's other things that hold you back before you get close to 10% of the way to that number of farms - technical expertise, labour costs, bandwidth out of the country etc.
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MosCow Knights...
Not to worry, once this Ukraine thing blows over, we'll be in clover!Fonterra chief executive dairy Theo Spierings accompanied Groser to Moscow in May. Russians were reported as apparently wooing Fonterra to invest in dairy farms, including in eastern Russia.
Groser admitted he had been encouraging Fonterra to invest in the Russian dairy industry, which needed help to boost productivity.What could possibly go wrong....
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Paul Campbell, in reply to
The majority of California’s energy is already provided for by solar power stations
Not even close to that. In 2010 it was 53% Natural Gas, 14% from all renewables.
I suspect the word "new" was missing from that first statement
And it is changing quite fast - I was visiting a couple of weeks ago, a co-worker was proudly showing off his Chevy Volt and explained that he had installed solar panels, he sold daytime power to the utility at peak time prices and charged his car over night at far lower bulk rates ...
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Well, this is interesting:
Tatua, the small Waikato-based dairy co-operative, did well over the 2014/15 dairy season while its far bigger competitor, Fonterra, did not. The reason - powder.
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Greg Dawson, in reply to
Not to worry, once this Western Russia thing blows over, we’ll be in clover!
Fixed it for you
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
What could possibly go wrong....
dunno but does an amplituhedron have 42 sides?
Artist’s rendering of the amplituhedron, a newly discovered mathematical object resembling a multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated — the probabilities of outcomes of particle interactions
Bloody good read. -
Farmer Green, in reply to
Tatua also announced today , in a very rare move , that it had enrolled ten new suppliers , all clustered around the factory . Historically Tatua has been a closed shop ; they never took more supply than they wanted.
It would be interesting to know whether the new supply was deserters from Open Country or from Fonterra. I would pick that it was the latter because a shareholding would have to be purchased in order to become a Tatua supplier : not necessary in order to supply Open Country.Still the Tatua payout was a long way from the $16/kg M.S. that good quality Chinese milk can attract.
And a very long way from the $21/ kg. that a very small yoghurt factory in N.Z pays. -
Farmer Green, in reply to
Remember the huge deteriorating butter mountain that the U.S. would not sell to Russia during the Cold War years?
Remember how the butter was all sold to N.Z. ; converted to anhydrous milk fat and onsold to Russia?They both owe us.
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I remember they tried to sell it here, it was the wrong colour and tasted odd - no one would buy it
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
I remember they tried to sell it here, it was the wrong colour and tasted odd – no one would buy it
They tried adulterating it with local product.
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Chris Waugh, in reply to
I remember they tried to sell it here, it was the wrong colour and tasted odd – no one would buy it
I remember in my first year in Beijing some American friends gave me this weird lurid radioactive orange coloured stuff and tried to claim is was cheddar cheese. I tasted some (it wasn't long before I'd spent a year in Changsha, so I was quite used to trying weird stuff) and it may have once had something to do with a cow, but it wasn't any kind of cheddar cheese. As much as I love to rant about Fonterra, if I ever want to terrify myself I read about America's food industry.
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krothville, in reply to
read about America's food industry
If you're interested, the excellent documentary "Food, Inc." is on youtube. Makes me very grateful that most of our meat isn't produced like that.
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The overnight Global Dairy Trade auction saw milk powder prices fall again, this time by a further 10 per cent. I'm not sure where that leaves farm gate pricing but it's surely going to drop below $5.
I'd love to see the guest post by Farmer Green that Russell requested.
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Farmer Green, in reply to
I've thought a lot about it Alfie and I think that at this stage it would be foolish to stick my head any further above the parapet.
I'm always mindful of what happened to some friends who set out to do UHT milk into Asia about 30 years ago.
People travelling to Auckland from Paeroa over the last decades may have wondered at the existence of an empty , but seemingly never-occupied building beside the Waihou River (from memory).
The NZCDC saw to it that not one drop of milk ever entered that factory.
Of course today , every man and his dog is putting in UHT factories to service the Asian market . . . but that's O.K. right? -
Something similar happened to Tom Kane in Christchurch. He owned Applefields and found a lucrative market in the US which would have seriously increased his income, but the Apple & Pear Marketing Board wouldn't allow him to sell direct. Tom is an obstinate chap and refused to give in -- he ended up leaving apples to rot on the trees in several large orchards. The land they occupied are all housing developments these days.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
I’ve thought a lot about it Alfie and I think that at this stage it would be foolish to stick my head any further above the parapet.
Damn, that's a shame. I've found what you have to say in this really useful. Let me know if you reconsider.
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Richard Aston, in reply to
Damn, that’s a shame. I’ve found what you have to say in this really useful. Let me know if you reconsider.
+1 I second that Russel
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That dairy industry story is very interesting, thanks!
I had a bit of a look around and found a Q&A that the American government agency which sold the butter produced at the time, as you could imagine a lot of people in the US were highly annoyed at what was happening!
http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&item=571128http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/07/business/new-zealand-s-plan-reprocess-us-butter.html
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
I had a bit of a look around and found a Q&A that the American government agency which sold the butter produced at the time
Thanks Ben, interesting background to a weird episode. I remember spotting the Twin Flags branded butter at Foodtown Grey Lynn and thinking 'How stupid do they reckon we are?' I'm pretty sure I recall reading that a bunch of that ill-advised exercise in dumping was rendered down to butter oil and flogged to the Soviets, who would have ended up with a proportion of NZ product.
The Dairy Board was also NZ distributor for the Lada vehicles they'd traded for agricultural produce. Later in the 80s they wound up with a big unsold inventory of Lada Samara hatchbacks. Because NZers were by then spoilt for choice with Japanese imports and cheap Hyundais, those badly built Soviet versions of the early 70s VW Golf languished unsold under a buildup of seagull droppings in a holding pen at the Port of Napier.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
buttery power...
The Dairy Board was also NZ distributor for the Lada vehicles they’d traded for agricultural produce.
...the spread of the Larda?
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
I'm pretty sure that Stolichnaya vodka was part of the deal too, but no Kalashnikovs. Guns for butter would have been a step too far, even by the byzantine standards of those late cold war times.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
If you’re interested, the excellent documentary “Food, Inc.” is on youtube. Makes me very grateful that most of our meat isn’t produced like that.
And, of course, Fast Food Nation.
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