Counting the breadwinners
YOU don’t get more Wheatbelt than the farmer-owned cooperative CBH Group.
The recently minted pages of its annual report are so resplendent with pictures of weather-beaten cockies, golden wheat fields, intimidating grain silos and plump wheat ears that the document should have a hay fever warning for the uninitiated reader.
The Note accepts this homage to the group’s roots (and ownership), but the hard-edged business writer in us could not help noticing that perhaps something was missing?
Where were the images of Indonesian flour mills?
After all, the Interflour joint venture that CBH has in South-East Asia proved something of a breadwinner for the group in a tough year due to the 2010 season’s drought.
Interflour made $14.7 million for CBH in a year when it made a $31 million pre-tax loss.
Unlike cattle breeders, we reckon CBH does not need to worry too much about highlighting what becomes of its product when it arrives in foreign destinations.
Next year we hope to see a few farmers dressed in batik or maybe a Javanese Wayang Kulit shadow puppet scything grain the old-fashioned way.
Name shame
AS previously explained, The Note is always wary of poking fun in anyone’s direction. Firstly, we really don’t like hurting people’s feelings and, more importantly, there’s the risk of the joke backfiring.
So it seems the latter is the case with our small joke about the naming of ships that patrol our waters. We suggested that the Royal Australian Navy was the customer of a new line of Cape Class boats being built by Austal and named after Australian geographic features.
Of course, the customer is not the navy, it is the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. It must have been the excitement surrounding former navy man Mark McGowan’s ascendancy to the Labor leadership that distracted us last week.
