(Bloomberg) – Eddie Arthur has spent a century of the button from the farm to the farm to the farm every day to stare in the trees and calculate the number of centuries they have.
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At each station, the number is recorded from a handful of trees, and monitors flowers that can eventually grow for centuries the size of the knee ball and track how dry or wet ground. Regardless of weather conditions or road, the process is repeated in about 20 farms per day to collect data that helps to predict the size of the total harvest.
The job has not changed for decades. But the service provided by POD meters such as Arthur in Forestero has become more important than ever as hedge and chocolate boxes are trying to measure production in a market that was shaken due to an unprecedented shortage.
“With every visit to the farm, you have a better idea of how to advance the season,” said Arthur in Gaanio on Ivory Coast, where the centuries before the middle of this year were calculated. “I have done so for many years that it has become part of my hobbies. But I treat every trip with the same level of seriousness and attention.”
Future contracts rose to a record last year after bad weather conditions in crops in the largest farmers of Ivory Coast and Ghana. She surprised the intensity of the intensity of the experienced market players, caused chaos in the global supply chain in cocoa and gave a reminder of the extent of the exacerbation of the exacerbation due to climate change.
This prompts people to pay more attention to Count data to get an idea about production in an industry in which supply data is relatively rare.
“Counting the Qurna was important for more than 50 years, but some have chosen to ignore data,” said Steve Watridge, head of research on tropical research services by Expana, who is also the pods. “People are satisfied with low prices. Now, there is more attention after people have been arrested in what happened in the past 18 months.”
It is extremely difficult to get an idea of the supply image in the unusual cocoa industry from other major crops such as wheat or sugar. This is due to a lower amount of dominant players and because governments in the Ivory Coast and Ghana – which are closely organized – rarely publish the display numbers.
For this reason, POD meters such as Arthur can provide valuable vision.
The farmer visits a small team on Ivory Coast and Ghana throughout the year. Through the eye, they are considered pods according to the size on the chosen trees, they return again and again to estimate how the entire farmer is going. It also monitors issues such as pest injury.
Information is recorded on a tablet and accessible by the Forestero office in Lausanne, Switzerland for the analysis that is then provided to customers including chocolate companies, processors, merchants, trucks and hedge funds.
The count plays an important role in assessing global supplies and discovering crop disease, and becomes a more reliable indicator in the few months before the harvest. The visits also show how trees deal with seasonal extremism, such as the dusty Harramiyatan winds that start around November, and more moisture periods.
Arthur said earlier this month: “The roads are bad during the rainy season, but it is also my favorite period,” Arthur said earlier this month. “The trees return to life and enjoy being on the farms.”
Tropical research services and tropical research services are among a handful of independent horns simulation companies. Many adult traders and treatments have their own meters, although data is closely protecting.
Chocolate and boxes companies are among those that show new interest in Count data, according to Forestero Fabrice Laurent founder.
It is another sign of how the money is trying – which can earn a large money by taking advantage of rapid price seizures – getting a advantage in the markets and weather markets. Pierre Andrand, director of the hedge reformer, highlighted the cornea when talking about the cocoa market in December.
Getting an advantage over other traders can be particularly profitable in a market like cocoa, which has witnessed significant fluctuations in prices. New York futures, which is almost 38 % of the peak of December, have decreased, although they are still expensive historically.
Although the outcome device has given way to tablets that download data to the cloud, technology cannot easily replace the part on the floor of the POD count. The use of drones to count will still need someone to guide him and some companies have tried to harness satellite images, but it is difficult to separate farms from other forest areas.
Laurent said: “Counting Qurna is the same for 20 years, as I almost measured the return through the same methodology.” “What has changed is the way you look at, the type of analysis that you can make, the type of account model you use and the type of learning machine system.”
One change over the years is to monitor crop disease. Equatorial research services were among the first to discover the spread of the swelling virus in the Ivory Coast nearly two decades ago, and now the newspaper meters are using detection in the field for the disease to draw the scope of the problem.
Crops are also increasingly at the mercy of the most extreme weather conditions in the wake of climate change. This means that tools such as courage can be crucial in discovering whether the harvesting horizons are shifting quickly.
“We know that global warming also plays a major role in unprecedented weather events and this has a great impact on cocoa production,” Laurent said.
-With the help of Faridon Boya.
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