Market Prospects with Franek Smith

Oh, an excellent CV to come on the PGRO podcast then, Franek.

That's, uh, that's good.

Um, do you want to just explain a little bit about the market as you see it from a, you know, from someone who's buying and selling peas and beans, um, on a, a daily or weekly basis? Um, it's very hard to describe the market in one sentence, but if I was to, to put you on the spot for a kind of top-line view of, of where the market's at at the moment, how would you describe it?

Um, we would really need to break it down into individual commodities and actually the, the, the sort of subcategories of those commodities, Ben.

And for pretty much all of them, the one word I would use is complicated.

Um, there are many external factors completely that have nothing to do with even farming that are affecting us at the moment.

And for those listening, it will be a little bit cliché.

We're going to talk a little bit about Trump and Iran and things like this, but they have just such a massive effect globally on commodity pricing and also logistics.

So, um, you, you add that into actually the complex of what affects us on a daily basis, which is supply and demand, and actually animals and people eating these products coupled with these other things, and it makes it an interesting dynamic.

Uh, and, and what would you say the, the mood is like at the moment? We're going to sort of go into, um, the individual, um, individual varieties of, of peas and beans that you might be sourcing.

But, um, given the amount of geopolitical instability and, um, and volatility that, that we all know about, how would you describe the current mood, um, with-

Um-

... with what you're trying to buy at the moment?

I would say probably subdued, not just from the, uh, the consumer end, but also the supplier end as well.

So, um, when we read the news a lot at the moment, and I don't want to focus too much on this, but there's a lot of negativity that we read in the news, specifically about trade and about, um, geopolitical policies and everything that's going on.

So that uncertainty, uh, Ben, puts risk into our supply chain and the way that we as an industry, not just Wherry's, make money is by having consistency.

That can be consistency of quality or consistency of supply, and whenever we have any of these things happen, it just makes it a little bit more of a bumpy road for everybody.

So really, um, there are lots of things that we as an industry can have control over, but the two that we can't is geopolitical, which is way above our, our pay grade, and the other one is the weather.

So yeah, in summary to your question, current mood, probably a little bit subdued, a little bit worried probably is the right way to phrase it.