Edwards says he’s still up in Napier, it’s tracking 24-25 degrees after having the big wet and farmers are flat out trying to catch up on docking – commonly known as tailing in the South and getting crops into the ground. 

Mackay goes onto discuss the market for the strong crossbred wool being in the “doldrums” however the weekly report Mackay receives from his Aussie correspondent, Chris Russell, on the state of the Australian Wool Market - mainly fine wool - is that it’s lifting quite nicely. 

Edwards then goes onto discuss the sale in Christchurch yesterday where there were about 13,000 bales across NZ for market with crossbred wool holding value, seeing some good final prices and Merino having had an especially good season which is starting to come to an end. “We had quite a few half-breed hoggets' on the market yesterday as well” says Edwards, “of course these are generally all in the South, but they were well sought after, and we’ve got an Australian buyer that tends to buy through one of the exporters - a local exporter” who was at the Christchurch sale which Edwards says, “helped shunt things along”. 

Mackay jumps in and posits Wool’s not the only commodity “facing headwinds” and that the world is “probably heading towards recession”, making it not good for commodity prices “The upside from an exporting point of view, 'cause we've gotta be positive, or else we'd all jump off the top of the building” jokes Mackay “is the fact that the freight costs are starting to realign” post Covid – Edwards agrees and gives an example of the costs they have been looking at with a 20 foot container 2 years ago sitting around $3500 USD to get transported out of China into Europe which then jumped to $12,500 USD but indications to him is that it is now coming back down to around $4,500-$5000 USD.  

Edwards goes onto discuss the cost of energy with one of his overseas customers price per Mega Watt jumping from 17 to 270 Euros. “In the same token, they're looking at other ways that they can offset those” says Edwards further adding that they were looking at putting heat pump cores into the ground which will heat to about 13-14 degrees and utilizing the option of wind power.

Mackay redirects the conversation to the Rons AGM held earlier in the week. Unfortunately, Edwards was not able to attend, but he had heard from staff who were able to go, really positive feedback, adding “they did set up a pilot plant around a year ago to reconstitute the fibre and what they're doing and what they're being able to do with it, it's just growing and growing” explaining that they can use the particles in flame proofing, wool’s a protein so they can use them in digestible’s and in pharmaceuticals pigments and they can even re spin a 35 Micron fiber down to about a 12. Edwards said the team was really pumped up and getting a lot of overseas enquiries – largely pharmaceutical companies which was a real positive, moving forward.

Mackay closes out the interview with “The world needs sustainable energy, and it needs sustainable products, and there's no more sustainable product than wool”.