No-frills fert on offer
Ballance Agri-Nutrients has launched SimplyFert, an ex-hub and therefore lower-cost offering said to give its shareholders choice and flexibility for purchasing nutrients.
Quinfert owner, Bert Quin says his autumn fertiliser sales are nearly double last year’s.
This is despite farmer difficulties with the extended drought and getting their stock processed, not to mention complications arising from COVID-19.
He claims this a clear sign that more and more farmers are seeing through the “disinformation campaign” about Quinfert’s Algerian RPR, touted as an environmentally protective fertiliser<.
“It has longed been ranked one of the very best RPR’s internationally, in all the internationally used tests, and even more importantly, in field trials”, Quin says.
“Putting the hard facts forward in regular print advertising has had a large role to play in this”.
Quin believes farmers are becoming increasingly cynical about what they are being told by their regular supplier.
“They have been told for decades that soluble P doesn’t get lost in significant amounts to the environment in runoff or leaching. Now, with Quinfert appearing on the scene with its true RPR, farmers are being offered a drilling super type product as the saviour for the environment because it has far lower P losses than superphosphate,” he adds.
“Farmers were also told that high-performance RPR had become very hard to get.”
But Quin says that Algerian RPR had been available all the time and was offered to the industry.
European milk processors are eyeing more cheese and milk powder exports into South America following a landmark trade agreement signed last month.
Two European dairy co-operatives are set to merge and create a €14 billion business.
DairyNZ's Kirsty Verhoek ‘walks the talk’, balancing her interests in animal welfare, agricultural science and innovative dairy farming.
"We at Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and you at Dairy News said over six months ago that the dairy industry would bounce back, and it has done so with interest.”
Wairarapa sheep and beef farmer Karen Williams is the new chief executive of Irrigation New Zealand.
Whole milk powder prices on Global Dairy Trade (GDT) remains above long run averages and a $10/kgMS milk price for the season remains on the card, says ASB senior economist Chris Tennent-Brown.