ANTHONY CLARK: Agrishares: crop till you drop
Over half the assets of Zeder are in Pioneer, of which it can be considered a cheaper, geared play
I predicated many of the top stocks I chose for 2017 on my early assumptions that the maize harvest would be materially larger than market estimates at the start of that year, leading to significant benefits to animal rearing, animal feeds and milling companies.In the end, a 17Mt crop, the largest in history, was recorded following the devastating drought and a harvest of 7.7Mt in 2016.The Safex price of maize, a key hindrance to food and poultry stocks, crashed on the record harvest to below R2,000/t as the maize price soared to R5,000/t. This aided input costs and thus led to margin expansion.My top mover in 2017 was Astral Foods, which, from its selection to the year’s end, gained 124%. It reported record earnings due to lowered costs of feed for its giant poultry business, allied to firmer poultry prices due to localised structural issues.I also selected SA’s second-largest food business, Pioneer Foods, which has a large staples operation that, like Astral, I believed would show...
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