Broken Record

Welcome to my Friday dribble where we talk things agri sport and life.

Sounding like a broken record but there is still very little change in the weather pattern around the whole country. Some warmer weather might be good. Some of the old timers reckon that with Lake Eyre full it should lead to a wet late spring/summer...!!

Paul Thompson and the team at SHV must be going nuts at present. Select Harvest's updated the market this week. The crop from earlier this year was a cracker, the prices are good and a lower AUD is positive. The only point of concern is the cost of water, which given the dry conditions may be quite a bit higher than last year.

Backing up the theory on water was the CGC result out today. Australia's leading grower, packer and exporter of fresh fruit and veges Costa Group, reported a really crappy result with plenty of things going wrong. One issue for their citrus has been the cost of water in the Riverland region of S.A. 

This week we saw a classic example of a fast moving consumer gods (FMCG) company that is China facing, with a new highly paid CEO, have a major stumble. A2M has been growing extremely quickly and to keep up it now spends just over 10% of its sales figure on marketing. That's a whopping $135m pa on marketing...!!! Wow. The market wasn't exactly happy with this.. The stock started the week just under the $16 mark and finished just above $13.

For those of you who believe there are only 2 types of music, country and western, jump onto YouTube and have a listen to Charlie Fittler's new single "This guitar can’t drink beer". Charlie is a young bloke from Armidale and also my wife's cousin. He is only 16 years old, did a great job on "The Voice" and is a super keen country music singer.