Lots of great market and price information has been available to grain farmers for years.
So the Alberta Wheat Commission’s proposed crop price listing website needs to prove it has identified a true gap in farmer knowledge and can effectively fill that gap with a useable service.
That’s the conclusion I draw from speaking with a range of brokers, advisers, analysts and others who live and breathe the markets: if it really supplies information that’s available nowhere else, it’s worth doing.
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However, it also comes with a big caveat.
Some of the people I have spoken to are fuming about what the wheat commission is doing. They see it as an intrusion on valuable services they already provide and that government money is being used to undermine something already existing in the private sector.
That’s where the challenge to the wheat commission’s system lies. It’s got to add something unique to the information available rather than just supplanting present providers.
I get lots of great market information in newsletters I receive, such as John Duvenaud’s Wild Oats and some of the canadagrain.com services, Alan Johnston’s daily emailed report and other publications that fill up my email inbox. Most of the brokers I interview have market reports and updates they publish on websites or eblast.
Various organizations and companies provide price listing and reporting.
Marketing advisory services such as those offered by Agri-Trend and FarmLink give farmers live information on available offers and advice on what to move.
Duvenaud said he was annoyed by the federal contribution of $743,000 to the wheat commission service because he and colleagues such as Harold Davis already produce lots of price information and don’t see why government money should be creating what could become a competitor.
On the other hand, Brennan Turner of the online crops marketplace Farmlead.com thought the wheat commission service was a great idea.
One sees it undermining price transparency already offered by analysts, while the other sees it as offering more transparency that will help his price discovery mechanism work better.
Who’s going to be right?
So far the wheat commission plans are vague — on purpose. The commission is still examining what kind of information farmers think they’re not getting and discovering what the commission can effectively provide.
“The purpose of this project is to try to develop a mechanism to gather reliable, up-to-date … up-to-the-minute pricing,” said the wheat commission’s Tom Steve.
“What we’re trying to do, really, with this project is to provide a better understanding of how prices are determined.”
He thinks it won’t undermine the private providers who have built loyal followings.
“It’s really the advice and the expertise, the interpretations of those prices where their true value proposition comes in,” said Steve.
Brent Watchorn, Richardson International’s vice-president for marketing, noted the difficulty with posting live wheat bids: they change constantly, often apply only for a few hours and mean nothing if not defined by all the specifications on which they are based.
So the wheat commission project has its work cut out for it. It will have to find out the information farmers lack, determine how to get it for them in a way that is useful and demonstrate they haven’t reinvented the wheel and used government money to damage long-time suppliers of information and advice to prairie farmers.