Back from Ferrara and planing for 2008
Got back from Italy late last night. I’m now in Hull where we’ve got a meeting with our Italian customers just to review the crop and make sure that everything is in place for delivery of their requirements.
The season in Hull is almost complete, we’ve got about 500 tonnes left to harvest as from today which will take us through to the weekend—just need to make sure we get the best from the final crops.
My attentions now are clearly going to be focused on other crops. Potatoes in particular are causing us some difficulty—the hot dry weather that we’ve experienced giving us some problems that we’re having to overcome, particularly in terms of with volume with some of our contracted crops. We’re OK at the moment but we’re going to need some detailed discussions with our suppliers to make sure we’re covered both in terms of volume and of course the right quantity that we require.
Also, we’re looking at the 2008 pea season in quite some detail. We reviewed the outcome of the crops we grow in Chichester for seed which we will be planting next year and just making sure that all our requirements are covered, so we’ve got a meeting early next week to review the demand going forward both for our UK retail business and for export, we’ll need to plan for that, so that’s occupying our minds in some detail at the moment.
I’ll let you know how things progress over the next few days.
