SASKATOON – After being kicked off the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, rye should be given a new home at the Canadian Wheat Board, say some prairie farmers.
Derek Dewar, a Hazlet, Sask., farmer and member of the board’s advisory committee, says he plans to raise the issue at the committee’s next meeting June 9 in Winnipeg.
“Certainly marketing through the wheat board of anything makes sense to me,” he said, adding private grain mer-chants have done little to try to develop overseas markets for the crop.
Rye production and exports have declined throughout the 1990s. Foreign sales now languish around 100,000 tonnes a year, after averaging nearly 350,000 tonnes during the previous decade.
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Board success in developing new markets for rye is hard to predict, said Dewar, but “they couldn’t do a worse job anyway.”
Fellow committee member John Clair, who farms near Radisson, Sask., said because there are fewer vested interests involved in rye production and marketing than in major crops like wheat, barley or canola, there could be less political and ideological opposition to putting rye under the board.
A wheat board spokesperson said it’s up to farmers to convince government to make necessary changes to the CWB Act if they want rye to be sold through the board.
“With our market analysis and market development and weather monitoring and things like that, we feel we’ve got the infrastructure in place to take on whatever crops farmers would like us to market,” said Deborah Harri. “But our position is that it’s really up to farmers to decide what crops they want the board to market.”
Wallace Winter, who grows rye every year on his farm at Burstall, Sask., said he thinks export sales would improve if the wheat board included rye in its selling-basket of grains.
Disappointed by decision
He called the commodity exchange’s decision to drop the rye contract a disappointment.
“We had enough problems with price discovery under the commodity exchange, but now you can’t look to one single place,” said Winter, vice-chair of the Sask-atchewan Winter Cereal Growers Association. “It makes (determining prices) more difficult because everybody will be setting their own price and it’s usually lower rather than higher.”
Last year, Winter sold all of his production directly to a mill in Minnesota for a farmgate price of about $110 a tonne or $2.80 a bushel. If the crop hadn’t been good quality, he would have had to feed it or sell it to a local feedlot for around $80 a tonne or $2 a bushel.
He added the winter cereal growers association has no position on whether rye should remain on the open market or be marketed by the wheat board.
