DRUMHELLER, Alta. – Terry Johnston says he can’t live without his daily market reports from an international service he works for called Globalink.
Globalink is a computer-fed marketing service based in Iowa. It carries weather reports, currency exchanges, interest rates, immediate grain, oilseed and livestock prices, market analysis, as well as world economic and political news.
Canadian market information was added in 1991 and continues to expand annually.
Farmers need to know what is going on everywhere whether it’s tracking the American soybean crop, Australian wheat harvests or the futures markets, said Johnston. Information is available 24 hours a day.
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“It works for any person raising non-board grains and oilseeds where they have control of their marketing,” said Johnston in an interview at Drumheller, where an agriculture computer fair was held last week.
Johnston is an Iowa corn and soybean farmer who also works for the Globalink service based out of Cedar Falls, Iowa.
To sign on, a subscriber needs an IBM compatible computer with a special 1.4 metre satellite dish to pick up messages.
Set up charges are $350 and about $85 a month for what Johnston describes as a “smorgasbord system.” All market information goes to all subscribers and it’s up to them to select the data they want.
There’s several thousand users in North America, said Johnston.
“It’s a management tool. Half your job is farming and the other half is marketing,” he said.
Historical trends
The service also provides historical information in graphs or charts so farmers can, for example, call up the cattle market for the last 10 years and see how the cycle repeats itself.
With such a system, hog farmers would also have been able to project the downward price spiral in their industry by tracking prices, supply and demand.
On the grain side, farmers can connect with any town in the U.S. and discover what individual elevators are paying for grains or oilseeds on any day. On the Canadian side, grain companies provide street prices.
Within a couple of weeks Globalink will release full color, live weather reports for Western Canada. Radar reports will supplied by Environment Canada said Johnston. Reports will be updated every 15 minutes with a playback feature so farmers can trace weather patterns as they move across the regions.
