Pescod Late Edition
We will call him “Ken” to keep his identity secret, but he tries to keep up to date on things of an agricultural basis. A large- scale farmer in central Alberta, he is also on the road a lot be- cause of other specialized skills he has, but it was time for an update because we notice Arianne Resources seems to be perking up.
Ken tells us that farmers are happy these days, that canola prices are hanging in (at rather high prices we think), not so happy that wheat prices are down a bit. But then if you want to get the farmers excited, just ask them about what’s going on with prices for the fertilizer business and those prices are up dramatically.
There are three components a farmer needs Ken tells us, phosphate, nitrogen and potash. He tells us the prices for phos- phate was $500 a ton last year and it’s currently around $800 a ton now. As for nitrogen it was close to $700 a ton last year and this year they may be looking at as much as $1035 a ton. Then there is potash. But this is where it gets interesting. Ken tells us that every year phosphate and nitrogen are absolutely neces- sary. Potash is not. You can skip a year or two on potash with- out hurting yields too much and given that the two absolutely necessary ingredients are so expensive, he suggests the he, and a lot of other farmers will probably not be using potash this year.
Which get us to Arianne Resources, which is a phosphate project in Quebec. The Lac a Paul project hit some rather tasty targets back when markets were kinder and the deposit was found to have a big resource and to have a nice kicker in that there was a chunk of titanium found in the resource.
In the last few weeks the federal government has announced some rather generous grants to the roads, railways and Port of Saguenay that would be beneficial to Arianne (and a lot of other potential iron ore producers in the area).
Over the last several months while the stock has had a two- for-one sale, it has been interesting to see a rather talented group of individuals join their board of directors. After all, to build this project will involve either huge financial obligation and lots of time to get their project developed or the more likely sce- nario, of one of those directors finding the right fit with one of the big boys to simply buy them out.
The game might be on...again.