From last month to this wheat is up in the Canadian Wheat Board’s Pool Return Outlook. Here are the PRO words:
“Wheat values are up between $5 and $13 per tonne from last month’s PRO, depending on class, grade and protein level. Durum is up between $1 and $5. malting barley is down$1 per tone, while Pool B feed barley is up $3 per tone.”
Those aren’t shocking numbers. But what I wonder is how the heck anybody can look forward and project prices with any confidence whatsoever in the world’s tempestuous grain markets? Wheat is an especially challenging commodity these days, with a wild range in prices this calendar year alone. I said “calendar year” there, not “crop year.”
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Since the beginning of 2011 Minneapolis hard red spring wheat has gone from under $9 to $10.50 then down to $9.25 then back to $9.50. So where do you go from there? How do you guess-out where things will go not just for the remainder of 2010-11, but also for 2011-12? That’s a crop that hasn’t even been planted yet.
I’m glad I don’t have to do that, because I’d no doubt be wrong. But on Monday someone gets a big stage on which to be wrong, which is the wheat board’s GrainWorld conference. That’s when the board trots out its 2011-12 PROs, guessing at a final pool price that won’t be fully realized until about two years from now. With such a long, long way from the end of that marketing year, the only truly remarkable aspect of Monday’s PRO unveiling would be if, in two years time, it actually turns out to be true. By that time, of course, I will have forgotten what was said way far in the past, when the first 2011-12 PRO was released. So it will just have been another tree that fell in the forest whose sound no one will quite recall . . .
Anyhow, stay tuned to this blog for live, action-packed coverage from GrainWorld!! I hope to do live updates from every speech and session as the conference goes on. So if you come here Monday and Tuesday, it’ll be like you’re there, except that every speaker will only give three-paragraph speeches, there is the occasional unsettling and gratuitous reference to British dreadnoughts, and you won’t get to taste the Fairmont Hotel’s coffee, which pours from silver urns like grain pouring out of the back of a truck.
