The Farmers Club Newsletter

The “Club Notes” for Wednesday, the 3rd of January 2024.

By Dwain Duxson

If you can, please get your family, friends and colleagues to sign up. See the website link here.

When they sleep you swoop

I worked out that the Ag media go to sleep over the Christmas and New Year period. Some haven't put articles up since the 15th of December and still aren't back as we write. It got me thinking that as a start-up wannabe media business like The Farmers Club, we need to be fully operating when the others are sleeping. So that’s what we did every day, even Christmas Day. It's a good strategy for any up-and-coming business to work out the incumbent's vulnerabilities and start focusing on those areas. We know Farmers don't stop over this period, yes, some might slow down, but they are still on the search for information, Grain prices, Livestock prices, Weather info, Ag News, etc. They don’t want to miss anything. If you have a business in a competitive market, make sure you're servicing your customers when your competitors aren't. Reply to [email protected]

At $400 everything needs to go right

As soon as we put it out there that someone is willing to pay $250 an acre lease from prime Wimmera Country, someone comes along and gazumps that. Not by a bit, but a lot. My contact in the Yorke Penisula of SA is involved with a lease that is $400 an acre. The Yorke Peninsula is a prime Cropping Country that sells for between $10,000 to $15,000 per acre. And they also grow a lot of Lentils, which have had terrific gross margins over the last couple of years, according to my source. But he did add that at $400 an acre, everything has to go right, and that sort of appetite is only for the ones that are geared up with the right Machinery that can easily scale to bring something like a new lease into a Cropping program. Any higher bids on $400? Reply to [email protected]

Messing with the current model

I am sitting here in the Ute on top of our Platau on our little Farm, writing this on my laptop with power unassisted internet via my hotspot on the phone. It's pissing down outside, and the thunder and lightning are constant. The reason I am here is because we have no power in the house. The power runs the Internet, and because the phone service is ordinary, it also runs the booster. That's fine. We adjust. But it got me thinking about how much we rely on having power at the flick of a switch. We wrote about it just recently in our Farm Tender Daily newsletter. Take a read here. It's a big concern that the Government, in their big push down the renewables track, how they might harm the current system and set us back decades. I can't blame them for this particular outage, but there are real concerns about them messing with the current model. Do you share some of these concerns? Reply to [email protected]

Your replies

Below is where we take some of the most relevant comments from your replies. All quotes will remain nameless. See a few below:

• “We lease country in our area, and we have been aiming at a country that needs a bit of “cleaning up” or “pulling into line”, as they say”. - About Leasing Farmland.

• “We changed over from Merino’s to White Dorper in 2012. The best move we ever made”. - In reply to our Wool on Wool off Note.

• “My mum always drummed it into her kids that we made our own opportunities”. - In regards to our create your own opportunities Note.

• “Hello Dwain. Just a quick note to commend you on the service you provide at Farm Tender and congratulate you on your thought-provoking writings in both your newsletters”. - Just one of the many nice replies we get.

  Reply to [email protected]

End of message.

Dwain Duxson
0427 011 900

Random and associated Ag articles and images.