Hmm, I didn't know Hotcopper had a curfew. Is there a morning 'not before' curfew also that I should be aware of? FYI, I worked 44 years on shift work, mostly 'back of the clock' in a 24/7/365 industry so midnight is no stranger.
Wow, knowing a farmer or two is something I invented? Is that what you are saying? What a crock! It's not the Brady Bunch, dude. My Father, from Sydney, remarried a widow from up that way when us 'kids' were all in our thirties and well established in our own careers. I have not a skerrick of farming blood in my veins, and never claimed to. Clear?
So anyway, those who apparently have there head up their ass, [just looking at your photo there Pie] might not be interested in the next part. But for anyone who may like to know a little more about the practical use of urea, read on, because here it is from the horse's mouth.
Over the weekend I rang one of the farming 'side' of the family to find out more about exactly what he does with urea. He farms on really good soil, on the flat plains near Edgeroi. He said he sows dry urea in with the seeds [canola, sorghum. Durum wheat]. The urea goes down the same tube as the seeds into the ground at the rate of 20kg per hectare. So one tonne of dry urea will be enough for 50 hectares. Unless I'm having another Homer moment, I calculate that one hectare's worth of urea at $800 per tonne costs $16. Do you know how many $$$ to the hectare these guys get with a good crop? Well, let's say $16 per hectare is chickenfeed. Or let's not say that, because some city slicker might feed urea to chickens. Let's say it's insignificant.
Now these guys don't do farming by guesswork. They have agronomists on hand and soil testing and all sorts of modern inventions. They have found that if they have a couple of dud years, due to drought, that the nitrogen from the urea stays in the soil. I mean the crop withers away before getting going, and before using up the nitrogen sown with it. When a drought ends, as it did in March last year, they usually don't have to sow in any additional urea for the first crop. If they do, they get a really healthy looking crop with not much stuff to harvest at the top.
Price to farmers for urea - those smooth upward graphs for urea you see in glossy PFS brochures are nothing like what goes on in the real world of farming. In the real world, prices can go up or down maybe $200 per tonne over a short period, maybe days? So if you drew a graph from a farmer's perspective it would be very saw toothed indeed. Prices tend to be highest in the autumn, when winter crops are being sown. Old Mate smooths this out by keeping a big bin of urea on his property and buying more when prices are more to his liking.
What's he worried about? Nothing much at the moment. Steers are bringing around $5/kg at the Tamworth market, which means each 'finished' steer he sends there, weighing about 700 kg, earns him $3500. But after the head, tail, some of the bones and unusable stuff are stripped out, and the abattoir, wholesaler and Colesworth all take their, umm, cut, can you imagine where the price of eye fillet is going? We may all have to dial back a cut or two.
Oh, he is worried about canola prices. He has 2000 tonnes of canola in his farm bins [silos?] which he has held on to since harvesting, in the expectation of higher prices. But prices have gone down $100 per tonne. The oil seeds prices Aussie farmers receive are a world index price. Somewhere in a far off land [he doesn't know where] some other farmers must be having a bumper crop also. Seems unfair, but that's just how it rolls.
Yes, he gets his products and services from Incitec. Doesn't like Santos because of the fracking soon in the Pillaga scrub, even though they will be bringing big bucks into town i.e. Narrabri. Is certain it will damage the artesian water supply. He has never heard of LCK.
And I think that's the report from the Real World.
Mate, I don't buy your manufactured outrage that I "ridiculed a primary producer". Any reasonable person can see that my comment related to the faint hope that IPL might be making money from fertiliser at the moment.
The "carbonated beverage" part references my mate Grunta, who has said here several times that IPL is "making a fortune" selling excess CO2 to drinks companies. Not to disbelieve him, but I just have difficulty imagining how that happens, in the real world. Do they solidify it and truck it around as dry ice to Coca Cola Bottlers, are there big CO2 tankers sailing up the Brisbane River, or perhaps a secret CO2 pipeline running underground to the XXXX brewery. A mystery.
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