This from The Rude Awakening:

Demand for food never wavers, even when times are tough. This fact is only one of the reasons to like Viterra (TSE:VT), a Canadian agri-business company. Viterra, an amalgamation of “vital” and “terra,” meaning “life from the land,” is the new name for a very old business new. The old name, Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, better reflects the company’s raison d’etre.

Viterra is in the grain-moving, storing, processing and cleaning business. You would think, based on the recent sell-off, that Viterra was selling the stuff. But Viterra is not a straight-up commodity play in the sense of selling grains. You would do better to imagine a toll road. Volume is the name of the game. Volume and efficiency, not grain prices, dictate the profit profile here.

Its largest business is grain handling, chipping in 65% of sales. Viterra has lots of those tall grain elevators you may have seen in grain country. About two-thirds of Viterra’s grains eventually head west by rail and ultimately wind up in the Asia-Pacific region. In this way, it’s a fine backdoor play on the booming demand in Asia and its peoples’ rapidly evolving diets. The falling Baltic Dry Index, which measures shipping costs, bodes well for Viterra. Cheaper shipping costs make Western Canadian grain cheaper for Asian buyers.

Viterra’s second largest business is as a retailer and distributor of agri-products such as fertilizers, seeds and crop protection products. The company has 276 retail locations across the Canadian prairies. Viterra is the biggest dog on the block, with 45% market share in Western Canada.

In the big-picture sense, Viterra’s profits tie more closely with seeded acreage and the mix of crops so planted. These variables do not vary much from year to year.

And just to juice up the mix a bit, Viterra has a 34% interest in Canadian Fertilizers Ltd. (CFL), a nitrogen fertilizer plant in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Here CFL earns a spread on the difference between fertilizer prices and natural gas. This business is not particularly significant at the moment, but it is an interesting asset, nonetheless.

The recent market crash has been rude to Viterra’s share price, but it is a gift for investors who want to buy more. Just yesterday, the company announced surprisingly strong earnings for the fourth quarter, thanks to robust demand for agricultural products like fertilizer. “Viterra blew the lights out in the fourth quarter,” one Canadian analyst cheered.

For all of 2008, Viterra earned C$1.25 per share. And yet, as I write, the share price is a mere $9.25 per share – or only about seven times earnings. Moreover, book value is nearly $10 per share. The financial position is strong, with net debt less than 8% of capital and loads of cash.

There are rough comparables out there that may help in arriving at a valuation for Viterra, such as Archer Daniels Midland on the grain handling side and Agrium on the retail side. Using a blended valuation of these two companies, I get a value for Viterra around $15 per share. And all of these agricultural companies are trading at somewhat depressed valuations.

Though it has little bearing on the share price, Viterra may be the only publicly traded enterprise run by a former NFL wide receiver. Mayo Schmidt, CEO of Viterra, played wide out for the Miami Dolphins in a brief stint. More importantly, though, Schmidt deserves credit for making many great moves – such as the acquisition of Agricore in 2007 – and proving a savvy chieftain.

There are more moving parts here, so I am simplifying somewhat, for the sake of brevity. The bigger picture is what I want you to focus on. In Viterra, we have a well-financed and well-managed company trading at attractive levels. The company also has big winds in its sails. To repeat; Viterra is like a toll road for grains. And I don’t see any decline in the traffic of that toll road over the next several years.

I expect Viterra will be a good investment over the years. At a minimum, I expect Viterra to exceed its old high of $15, as the grain markets enjoy another push next year.

Source: Investing In Food

This from Rude Awakening:

Indisputably, a slowdown of sorts now unspools across the markets of the world. But you’d never know it looking at Saskatchewan. What follows is another look at the great boom taking place here and a couple of ways to participate. There are more wrinkles to explore in what is shaping up to be a robust investment idea.

To begin, let’s add a bit of color to this unique story. As far as natural resources go, Fortune has smiled broadly on this land between the 49th and 60th parallels. It is the world’s largest producer of uranium and potash. The former is a critical component in the “nuclear renaissance.” The latter is a key fertilizer that sells for $1,000 per ton, compared with only $300 per ton a year ago. Saskatchewan is the world’s largest exporter of chick peas and lentils. And it is also rich in oil and gas. The U.S., in fact, buys more oil from its northern neighbor than it does from Kuwait.

The riches so far earned stagger the mind. At a time when governments everywhere face gaping budget shortfalls, Saskatchewan is awash in cash. On a budget of only $9.4 billion, the province reports a surplus of $3.1 billion. Of this, some will go toward highway repairs, better hospitals and improved schools. Not needing so much money, the government announced its largest cut in personal income taxes in its history.

It also paid off 40% of its provincial debt. Prudently, the government also decided to sit on a $2 billion cash cushion, just in case.

Many of these notes come courtesy of Brad Farquhar, vice president of Agriculture Development Corp. Hailing from Regina, the capital of the province, Farquhar has a front-row seat. “My house has about tripled in value in the last five years,” he says by way of illustrating the relative immunity of the province to the global ills that chill other markets. No housing bust here. In fact, values are rising for nearly everything, including farmland, which is Farquhar’s metier as an investor. His firm invests in farmland through its investor-owned funds.

Farmland stands to benefit from trends that you are now well familiar with if you’ve been reading this letter for any length of time. Some of the most important points bulls will commit to memory are these:

• World wheat consumption has exceeded production in six out of the past eight years
• World wheat stocks are at a 30-year low.

Greater prosperity in China and India lead to shifting diets consisting of more protein – eggs and meat. As reported in Farquhar’s farmland prospectus, to produce 1 pound of meat requires 10 pounds of grain: “Therefore, the dietary shift from grains to meat significantly increases the demand for grains.”

By tradition, China has usually produced and exported large amounts of grain. That is no longer the case. Rapid urban expansion and “desertification” of existing arable lands, along with water shortages, have all led to lower levels of supply. The same is happening in India.

The global urge to produce more biofuel also creates competition for a smaller base of farmland acreage. More acreage devoted to corn for ethanol, for example, means less devoted to soybeans or other crops used for food for people or livestock.

Saskatchewan is in a particularly good spot to gain from these broad trends. Almost half of all the farmland in Canada is found in its golden prairies. Wheat, canola and barley represent three-quarters of the crop acres in the province.

Even the icy-cold fingers of the credit crisis seem stunted here. Canada’s big agricultural lender is backed by the state. Farmers still have access to credit to plan for a big harvest next year.

The primary attraction of Saskatchewan farmland is cheapness. On that front, Farquhar offers the following jigsaw puzzle look at farmland prices in the region. Saskatchewan is the cheapest of the lot, at $405 per acre.

Shortsighted government policy was the main villain. From 1974-2003, you had to be a resident to own farmland. (”During this period, Saskatchewan was also a net exporter of people,” Farquhar’s prospectus points out. “It was a province whose population was in decline.”) Doing away with these restrictive ownership requirements in 2003 unlocked some of the value already. Annual declines in farmland values immediately began to reverse.

Saskatchewan farmland has a lot of ground to make up, though. Only 22 years ago, farmland here was more valuable than in neighboring Manitoba. But today, Manitoba’s farmland is more than 50% higher than Saskatchewan’s, at $668 an acre. The discount is attracting ranchers and grain farmers from neighboring Alberta, as well as immigrants from abroad. The government of Saskatchewan actually has a fast-track program in place to assist immigrants looking to farm in the province.

Statistics compiled by the Canadian government show that the average farmer in Saskatchewan is 52 years old. That leads Farquhar’s team to conclude in its prospectus: “The aging farming population in Saskatchewan has created a buying opportunity that [we] believe may not return for another generation.”

The next generation is less interested in farmland. The older generation will, in many cases, have to sell to folks beyond kith and kin.

For all of these specific reasons – and for the broader global trends affecting the grain markets – I expect that gap between Saskatchewan’s farmland and that of its neighbors to close quickly. Farmland values rose 11% last year in what I think are still the early stages of a multiyear boom.

Source: Saskatchewan!

For the tale of the tape, the TSX Exchange tacked on 2.17%, while the TSX Gold Index was the laggard by gaining a modest 0.1% and the TSX Venture Exchange, Canada’s largest junior exploration bourse, added 0.95% with the declining issuers beating out the advancers by a 458 to 401 margin on volume of 117 million shares traded.

It seems like every few months Goldcliff Resource (GCN) puts out some bonanza grade surface samples from its notoriously high-grade Panorama Ridge property in British Columbia and the market responds. Today was no different as the company announced values of 5.366 ounces of gold per ton and 3.76 ounces per ton and its stock added C$0.08 to close at C$0.25. Drilling is expected to begin in the next few weeks.

Shares of Adriana Resources (ADI) added C$0.18 to close at C$0.90 after the company reached an agreement with ArcelorMittal (MT) regarding the principal terms for the development of an iron ore port facility in Brazil. ArcelorMittal will acquire 80% of the port for about $40.5 million with Adriana holding the remaining 20%. ArcelorMittal also agreed to acquire up to 19.9% of Adriana by completing two private placements worth up to C$25 million.

Shares of ATAC Resources (ATC) continued to gain ground after reporting a 78.54 metre intercept running 1.71 grams gold per tonne at its wholly owned Rau property in the Keno Hill district of central Yukon. ATAC ended the session up C$0.06 at C$0.40.

We are now at a critical junction in the season when interest usually picks up on the junior side and if Wednesday trading is any indication perhaps the downward spiral has been broken. With the number of declining stocks still outnumbering the advancers perhaps this is just wishful thinking. We will see what Thursday trading has in store.

Source: Resource Stock Roundup Thursday August 21, 2008

For the tale of the tape, the TSX Exchange plunged 2.79%, while the TSX Gold Index dropped 2.8% and the TSX Venture Exchange, Canada’s largest junior exploration bourse, fell 2.87% with the declining issuers continuing to swamp the advancers this time by a 704 to 302 margin on volume of 142 million shares traded.

Western Prospector Group (WNP) is looking to go private after Tinpo Holdings Industrial Company inked a deal to acquire all the outstanding common shares of Western for C$1.34 per share in cash. This offer will surely thwart the unsolicited takeover bid by Khan Resources (KRI). Western ended the day up C$0.58 at C$1.30, while Khan gained C$0.24 to close at C$1.09.

Great Panther Resources (GPR) posted a record 436,072 silver equivalent ounces in the second quarter with 275,515 of those ounces coming from its Guanajuato operation. The Mexican miner ended the session up C$0.07 at C$1.14.

The Bank of Canada left interest rates unchanged but the lack of liquidity continues to punish equities with the more speculative stocks the hardest hit. We will see what Wednesday trading has in store
Source: Resource Stock Roundup Wednesday July 16, 2008

This resource estimation, presented in Table 1 (see below) outlines the initial inferred resource contained in the Double S zone as defined by diamond drilling up to December 2007. 51 diamond drill holes totaling 13,555.7 meters were used to create the model used in the resource calculation.

Based on a cut off of 0.009% U3O8, 74,215,000 tonnes averaging 0.012% U3O8 containing approximately 9 million kilograms (19.97 million pounds) of U3O8 has been outlined. This resource falls into the inferred mineral resource category under NI 43-101 reporting requirements.

Details of the new resource estimate are as follows:

All tabulated data has been rounded to three decimal places for U3O8 grades

Other Mineralized Zones

Uracan has drilled an additional 14,524.5 meters in 71 diamond drill holes since the end of 2007. None of these drill holes completed in 2008 are included in the above resource calculation. In addition to the mineralization at Double S, potentially significant uranium mineralization has been encountered at Lac Petit, Middle, TJ, Chan and the Johan Beetz Zones elsewhere on the property. Additional work has been, and will continue to be, carried out on these other areas to outline additional uranium resources. Numerous other showings and occurrences remain to be drill tested, and significant portions of the North Shore Property have had little or no significant exploration carried out yet.

Mineral Resource Estimate Method

The geologic model and block model was prepared by ResourceEye Services Inc. of Mission, British Columbia using MineSight® software. The work was completed under the supervision of Ron Parent P. Geo, an independent Qualified Person for the purposes of NI 43-101.

Geological interpretation of the distribution of various rock types were defined by 2D polygons modeled using 100 meter spaced sections and were the basis for coding the block model and drill holes. Five meter fixed length composites from only granites and pegmatites (host rocks to uranium mineralization at Double S) were used for grade interpolation. Other rock types were assigned to the waste category.

A block size of 25 meters by 25 meters in plan by 10 meters in height was used for the block model, with the block model rotated at 45 degrees. The blocks were coded directly from the 100 meter cross sections, with each section having a 100 meter zone of influence.

Blocks were clipped to topography, and overburden depth was used to calculate the bedrock surface. The volume of each block below topography was calculated and this was used to determine the total volume of each block in the model (topo).

Waste blocks were modeled using the 100 meter spaced cross sections to outline their distribution. Ore and waste percentages were obtained by having the waste polygons coded to the waste item. The ore and zone percent were coded from the granite/pegmatite polygons, determining how much of the block lies within the granite/pegmatite body. The ore percent was then reduced by the amount of waste in the block such that waste+ore=topo.

Block grades were estimated using the inverse distance squared method. 5 meter fixed length composites broken on rock type were used, and interpolation parameters were used as outlined below:

Search Distance model X (true azimuth 45) =75 meters
Search Distance Y=150 meters
Search Distance Z= 25 meters
Maximum 3D distance from block to accept data = 200 meters
Maximum distance allowed to closest composite and maximum distance to project single composite = 200 meters
Minimum number of composites per block=2
Maximum number of composites per block=10
Maximum number of composites per hole=3

A specific gravity (SG) of 2.631 g/cm3 was used to calculate the tonnages in the model. This SG was defined by a total of 225 samples collected from the Double S zone drill holes as part of the ongoing work program at the North Shore Property.

NI 43-101 Compliant Report

The Company plans to file a NI 43-101 compliant technical report covering the inferred resource estimate completed on the Double S zone. The report is being prepared by ResourceEye Services Inc. and will be filed within 45 days to the TSX Venture Exchange.

QAQC

The database used to create the model was based on the drill hole database provided by the Company. A total of 51 drill holes were used for the model. Ten percent of these drill holes were randomly selected and checked and found to be valid. Any minor errors encountered in the database were flagged and fixed as they were encountered.

ALS Chemex is the laboratory facility used for all assays from the North Shore Property program. Samples are weighed and catalogued before sample preparation. The samples are crushed to 70% less than 2mm, split and then pulverized to 85% of the sample being less than 75 µm. All samples are assayed using ICP-MS with analysis completed for 47 elements.

A QA/QC program was implemented as part of the sampling procedure for the drill program. Field duplicates and field blanks were inserted into the sample stream with at least one blank and one duplicate inserted per group of 40 samples sent to the laboratory. Uracan does not have a uranium standard to insert into the sample stream at this time. The laboratory also has an extensive in house QAQC system as part of their quality control system.

2008 Summer Exploration Program

In early June 2008 Uracan recommenced its exploration program on the North Shore Property, with ongoing drilling and field work to further outline areas of mineralization and high potential to host additional uranium resources. It is planned to continue drilling on the Double S zone to further define and expand the resource hosted there as well as further refine the resource to the measured and indicated classification with additional drilling and technical work. Mineralization at Double S remains open along strike and at depth.

Resource Classification

Mineral Resources have been categorized using the classification of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (2000), with the relevant definitions provided below. This classification is the basis for Technical Reports by Qualified Persons in Canada, and the classification is virtually the same as that of the JORC code (Australia) SME guidelines (USA) SAMREC (South Africa) and that of the European Union.

An Inferred Mineral Resource can be estimated on the basis of geological evidence and limited sampling and reasonably assumed, but not verified geological and grade continuity. The estimate is based on limited information and sampling gathered through appropriate techniques from locations such as outcrops, trenches, pits, workings and drill holes.

Due to the uncertainty which may attach to Inferred Mineral Resources, it cannot be assumed that all or part of an Inferred Mineral Resource will be upgraded to an Indicated or Measured Mineral Resource as a result of continued exploration. Confidence in the estimate is insufficient to allow the meaningful appreciation of technical and economic parameters or to enable an evaluation of economic viability worthy of public disclosure.

Uracan Resources Ltd. is a publicly-listed uranium exploration company, exploring for shallow, bulk tonnage style of uranium mineralization in Canada. Uracan is led by a team of proven exploration and mine entrepreneurs and mine-builders. The information in this news release has been prepared and reviewed by Marc Simpson, P. Geo., the Company’s Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101 standards.

Click here for a table of uranium stocks that are ranked by Mineral Resources, 43-101 compliant.

For further information please contact:

Gregg J. Sedun
President and CEO
604-682-5580

Marc Simpson
Exploration Manager
604-682-5580

Keith Schaefer
Vanguard Shareholder Solutions
604-608-0824

The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The foregoing information may contain forward-looking statements relating to the future performance of Uracan Resources Ltd. Forward-looking statements, specifically those concerning future performance, are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are detailed from time to time in the Company’s filings with the appropriate securities commissions.

Editors Note: This news release is brought to you by Casey’s Daily Resource Plus.

Source: 19.96 MILLION POUNDS U3O8 NI 43-101 COMPLIANT INFERRED RESOURCE AT SURFACE IN QUEBEC; REMAINS OPEN ALONG STRIKE AND AT DEPTH