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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ken Ludwig who wrote (45388)	11/11/2011 8:15:36 PM
From: E_K_S	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78526

Hi Ken - Marine Harvest I have a pretty good average price even though my first buys were above $1.00/share. Both China and Japan are going to be eating a lot of fish so long term the demand for protein will continue strong. The complete harvest cycle is almost three years so you can not really back off on production and then throttle it back up again. That's why the industry really needs to look at a sustainable program. There was another company working on a genetically bred fish which I am totally opposed to at this time. The key to profitability is the cost of the food mixture. They incorporate a lot of "wild" fish meal in their formula which in the past has been the most expensive component. I hear they are close to developing a formula that uses soybeans exclusively (soybean meal w/ a mixture of fish oils) that will be cheaper and hopefully cleaner when used in a production environment. In Idaho there are trout farms that are profitable and produce a lot of the fresh trout we see our local market. Catfish are harvested in the south and even in Asia they harvest shrimp (not necessarily the cleanest environment as they are known to use sewer effluent). There is a place for farm raised fish in the food ecosystem. They just lowered the farmed raised salmon price in my area to $4.99/lb. When you research how chickens, hogs and turkeys are farmed and the claustrophobic environment they live in and the enriched food loaded with the latest antibiotics, you will never want to eat any of that mass production farmed raised food. I find the current way they raise the salmon a middle of the road approach when compared to mass production of chickens and/or hogs. Of course, I raise my own chickens, do not eat pork and will only eat free range turkey's. One of my best AG investments so far is Seaboard Corp. (SEB). My first purchase was 10/2011 and it is up almost 30%. I only bought 5 shares at $1,697/share. I was tempted to sell one share today but the company is still undervalued even at current levels. They bought a 50% interest in Butterball Turkey last year and I bet they report excellent Q4 results due to Thanksgiving and Christmas "food" holidays. The company also runs very eco friendly Hog farms in Colorado integrated to use waste effluent to produce Bio-Diesel. The one biggest thing I am learning from my Agriculture Investment theme is there are still wild swings in both the input commodity prices and end user prices that are not easily hedged by management. You also get unexpected weather events that you have little to no control over. EKS