Thanks, Irwin.
Don’t wind me up too much, …………….you’ll get us both excommunicated!
Farm gate prices in New South Wales are about US$1.00 per pound for what we consider top quality (Yellow Box, being our favorite Eucalypt honey). Advertised prices and prices paid are not necessarily the same and most information is considered ‘private’ or ‘commercially sensitive.’
Caveat Emptor in reverse would be: Let the vendor beware. Few beekeepers here have an ‘asking price.’ Most adds ‘To Buy’ simply say, “Top Prices Paid.” Too many good years when Capilano was a young and beekeeper owned institution led the beekeepers to trust the buyers and not challenge the price. Now they have mostly lost any negotiating skills they may have once had.
Capilano is now one of the few publicly listed companies dedicated to honey. Their shares are in the toilet at the moment, but someone is still buying them. If the company survives this downturn, their shares could become as good as gold! Sheri questioned whether or not the Health aspect of the market would continue. My answer is an emphatic YES. Honey is set to go through the roof. The savy investor will soon be getting ‘primed up’ and buying their shares will be on the menu. I haven't bought any yet! I have my retirement money tied up in big barrels.
A license to cheat (Organic Producer Certification) can increase one’s price by 30 percent.
I advertised honey in drums to the commercial food industry and received nil responses. They appear to know they are buying glucose with a dash of honey and seem to have no interest in buying honey from beekeepers. I spoke to a person at a social event who worked in the Seventh Day Adventist food factory and he was most adamant that they put honey in the cereal they manufacture. The label on their product does not confirm this. So they obviously ‘call’ it honey there in the factory………. Oh yes, big drums of it coming in all the time! One can only wonder why they don’t put it on their mandatory ingredients list!
The supermarket is a strong market. Honey is priced on the shelf at or about 4 times its worth at the farm gate. Beekeepers who market direct some of their (or entire) product never had it so good. Entrepreneurial marketing has the sky for a limit, of course.
Big losses in foreign exchange futures are touted to have been the downfall of large honey consortiums here. The Aussie Dollar is pretty much at the mercy of the Gnomes of Zurich. Also, with lengthy contracts with Supermarket Chains, some had to jack prices up very high at one point to cover themselves. Either that or they hoped to squeeze the small packers out, but the net result was a heap of overpriced stock after a huge spring crop came in. Not being very smart, they attributed that to the higher prices offered. They obviously don't understand honey flows in a desert continent!
When everyone is losing, there is little fat in the fire for anyone.
We have a strong immigrant population here, and they are an insatiable market for honey.
I am very suspicious (of everything?) of the nitrofurans argument. Mostly we use our science to support our economic needs, not to protect our health.
If we all knew how many legal carcinogens are in all the other factory foods we consume we would gag! It would be debatable that the Chinese population is less healthy than the North American one. Obesity is conspicuously absent there, anyway.
If North Americans eat less than one percent of their sugar intake as honey, I can’t see why a poison measured in parts per million (or billion?) is likely to cause any increase in anorexia!
If the Chinese and the Argentineans are using these nitrofurans, perhaps they are better antibiotics than those we manufacture and market in Westernized countries. After all, they have the big surpluses of honey and we are unable to produce enough for ourselves. But do our regulators have permission from the World Health Organization to accept Chinese antibiotics? The plot sickens! What is a carcinogen and what is not is subject to the judgment of the expert. We do not encourage feeding test over extended periods. Even our much vaunted ‘Toxicity’ tests are mainly carried out on the young, (university students?) who everyone knows can eat manure without much shock!
Ian Steppler has it Right (Msg.111). With confidence in our world’s institutions at an all time low, the only way the honey industry can regain its rightful market share is if we start at the beekeeper level and rebuild our market from there. That is why I am so excited about “The Honey Revolution.”
http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?t=225156&highlight=honey+revolution
Someone play “The Last Post” as I am out of here for a while! Would rather not destroy my welcome all at once!
Cheers,
JohnS