Poudriere can't find /usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf

A relatively fresh installation of poudriere on a Raspberry Pi2B (armv7)
seems unable to find its poudriere.conf file. 

The machine reports:
# uname -apKU
FreeBSD generic 16.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT #22 main-n284255-6099b4600256: Wed Mar  4 22:54:57 PST 2026     root@generic:/us
r/obj/usr/src/arm.armv7/sys/GENERIC arm armv7 1600012 1600012

The poudriere installation via ports was set up using notes compiled at
www.zefox.net/~fbsd/poudriere_on_rpi4 which have worked in the past.

On attempting to start a poudriere build the machine reports:

poudriere bulk -j main sysutils/smartmontools > smartmon.log
# poudriere bulk -j main sysutils/smartmontools > smartmon.log
/usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf: ---: not found
# 

However, 
# ls -l /usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf
-rw-r--r--  1 root wheel 15088 Mar  6 18:54 /usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf
# 

suggests the file is present and readable. 

Apart from typos I can't see, is there something else that might be wrong?
The filesystem is UFS and I note what seems like emphasis on ZFS in the config
file. Could a default have changed in the last few months? 

Thanks for reading, and apologies if this is an idiotic question.

bob prohaska