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Jamie Mackay: The Country host on wool price surging up · Best of Business

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talk ZB Follow
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: this and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio.
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  Speaker 2: Jamie McKay's a host of the Country. Good Evening, Jamie, Jamie.
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  Speaker 2: You've got you there, Yes, you've got that.
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  Speaker 3: You got me.
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  Speaker 2: I've got you there, loud and clear. Good to have
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  Speaker 2: you on the show. And we've got some good news
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  Speaker 2: tonight about strong wool and the prices it's getting.
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  Speaker 3: Well, everything's relative, of course, tryan but yeah, look we've
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  Speaker 3: crept up from the lower last of all time in
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  Speaker 3: real terms in COVID, when some farmers were only getting
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  Speaker 3: believed or not just over a dollar a kilogram for
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  Speaker 3: their strong cross bread fleece. Well we're up to the
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  Speaker 3: four dollar mark. Now that is a clean price obviously, Yeah,
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  Speaker 3: that's a clean price, which are quite surely, but less crazier.
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  Speaker 3: One get too complicated on that one, but I just
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  Speaker 3: thought I'd put it into some historic perspective. It's all
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  Speaker 3: very well, you're to have woole at four dollars. Personally, myself, Ryan,
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  Speaker 3: I think it needs to be ten dollars or more
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  Speaker 3: for sheep farmers to make a buck out of it.
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  Speaker 3: And I'll just take you back in time to the
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  Speaker 3: Corean War in the early fifties when wool was a
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  Speaker 3: pound a pound and using I've heard various extrapolations and
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  Speaker 3: calculations on this one, but that might equate to something
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  Speaker 3: like fifty dollars per kilogram in today's money. So at
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  Speaker 3: four dollars we're well off the pace. Even when I
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  Speaker 3: was a hard up young father Ryan in the nineteen eighties,
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  Speaker 3: sharing all my own sheep, we used to get five
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  Speaker 3: or six dollars a kilogram for wool, and that would
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  Speaker 3: probably I don't hope, factor out to something like maybe
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  Speaker 3: twenty dollars a kilo in today's money. So yep, the
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  Speaker 3: markets come off absolute lows, but it's still a long
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  Speaker 3: way to go. And one of the big things in
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  Speaker 3: sheep farming at the moment Ryan is people who are
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  Speaker 3: getting rid off sheep that grow wool. They're getting into
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  Speaker 3: self shedding sheep sheep that shed their own wool, or
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  Speaker 3: even worse, ones that don't grow any wool to so
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  Speaker 3: the wool industry is far from being out of the woods.
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  Speaker 3: The good use for sheep farmers is Ryan. The lamb
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  Speaker 3: has really recovered this year. It's up about twenty five
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  Speaker 3: or thirty percent on where it was this time a
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  Speaker 3: year ago. And the farmers need it too.
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  Speaker 2: Interesting about the sheep that don't have any wool, because
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  Speaker 2: that you often hear farmers talk about. You know, it
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  Speaker 2: costs you more to share it off then you get
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  Speaker 2: paid for it. So you can understand I suppose why
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  Speaker 2: they do that now.
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  Speaker 3: A lot of sorry, a lot of animal health reasons
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  Speaker 3: for doing it as well. If they're not growing any water,
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  Speaker 3: you don't have to dip them, you don't have to dag,
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  Speaker 3: and you don't have to crutch them. You don't even
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  Speaker 3: have to dock them or tail them. So there's just
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  Speaker 3: they're just a lot easier animal to run and you're
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  Speaker 3: just running sheep purely for meat.
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  Speaker 2: Which and the meat is the thing that's paying right,
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  Speaker 2: So there you go. Now, vegetables, you've got to have
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  Speaker 2: some vegies with your lamb. So there's a problem though
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  Speaker 2: potentially without locally grown vegetable supply. According to an industry.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah John Murphy from Vegetables New Zealand said the current
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  Speaker 3: system was broken and local growers were being put out
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  Speaker 3: of business. And we all know the story about growing
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  Speaker 3: houses and places like pucacoe instead of vegetables. Some of
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  Speaker 3: our best soils now have houses on them. And John
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  Speaker 3: Murphy's quite rightly saying growers are being strangled by regional
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  Speaker 3: decisions that take too long, make no sense, and ultimately
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  Speaker 3: drive them out of business. He said vegetable growing needed
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  Speaker 3: to become a permitted activity in the current round of
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  Speaker 3: resource management reforms and places like Horo Fenua, there's a
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  Speaker 3: real threat of growers being told they can no longer
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  Speaker 3: grow veges. It's madness if you ask me. We should
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  Speaker 3: be growing more and more of them, but the cavalry
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  Speaker 3: is on the horizon and the form of Associate Minister
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  Speaker 3: of Agriculture Nicola Grigg. She's the minister responsible for horticulture
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  Speaker 3: and she says she's relentlessly focused on supporting the sector's success.
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  Speaker 3: Griggs this included considering policy amendments, including proposals relating to freshwater,
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  Speaker 3: water storage and vegetable growing. And I say good luck
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  Speaker 3: to the vegetable growers, Ryan, because anyone who's grown a
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  Speaker 3: veggie garden at home knows how tough it is let
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  Speaker 3: alone on a commercial scale.
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  Speaker 2: Absolutely and Timidoo Jamie the Old Alliance Smithfield Plant site
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  Speaker 2: is coming up for sale.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, and I don't know how well you know Samaru, Ryan,
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  Speaker 3: but it's quite a nice site actually thirty two hectares.
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  Speaker 3: It's an industrial site at the moment. It's zoned industrial.
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  Speaker 3: It's the old Smithfield plant that have been there for
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  Speaker 3: one hundred and thirty nine years. The Alliance Group shut
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  Speaker 3: it down. The wist talk of it becoming a housing development.
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  Speaker 3: Certainly in a good spot with good views. Interestingly, I
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  Speaker 3: found this was interesting. The land also was home to
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  Speaker 3: the Smithfield Coastal Observation Bunker, which was built in nineteen
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  Speaker 3: forty two. I'm assumed that was to check it in
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  Speaker 3: case the Japanese were coming to get us. It's got
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  Speaker 3: a hereage to New Zealand category listening. The closure of
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  Speaker 3: Smithfield is estimated to have cost Timaru up to fifty
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  Speaker 3: million a year in wages alone in the local economy.
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  Speaker 3: And here's another interesting stat for Orion to finish our
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  Speaker 3: chat tonight. The Timaru Council said in November that the
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  Speaker 3: closure of the meat works would cause a one point
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  Speaker 3: seven to six million dollar drop in water revenue, as
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  Speaker 3: the plant used about ten percent of Timaru's total water supply.
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  Speaker 2: Goodness me, Jamie, some great numbers in there. Thank you
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  Speaker 2: for that. Jamie McKay hosted the Country with Us just
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  Speaker 2: gone twenty six minutes after six.
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