Like many farmers, Dan Mazier has most of his grain in the bin and is thinking more about how and where he’s going to sell it this winter.
When he checked out the Alberta Wheat Commission’s new PDQ online price portal, he was pleased.
“I like it,” said Mazier, a Brandon area farmer and president of Keystone Agricultural Producers, checking it out for the first time.
“It seems like they customized it to what guys wanted.”
The PDQ site (Price and Data Quotes) is the product of farmer demands for greater transparency in Western Canadian cash bids after the dreadful 2013-14 crop marketing year. Logistical problems and other factors led to massive differences in prices between various elevator points and farmers often had no clear sense what their grain was worth.
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The Alberta Wheat Commission, with federal funding, hired consultants to design a price-reporting sytem that would offer them a better sense of what prairie grain buyers were offering across the Western Canada.
The PDQ site (pdqinfo.ca), launched Sept. 8, lists prices in nine Western Canadian regions for CWRS, CWAD, CPSR, canola and peas.
Each price is for a particular grade of crop in a region. The prices cannot be broken out into individual elevator points and are bid prices, not cash-paid prices.
The list of prices and the average pricing is supposed to provide farmers with a baseline upon which they can judge the specific prices they can see at individual buyers’ points.
“I think it will help,” said Alberta Federation of Agriculture president Lynn Jacobson, who is also an AWC director.
“It’s not the only marketing tool people should use. It’s just a guideline that’s giving you average prices. You should still do your own marketing. You can still negotiate better prices.”
Indeed, the prices on the PDQ site do not attempt to reveal the spread of prices between the benchmark grade and those for better or worse grades and qualities.
And it doesn’t address the specific pricing for grain traded on specifications outside grade, something that is becoming a more important part of crop marketing in the post-CWB environment.
All six members of the Western Grain Elevator Association are voluntarily providing their bid information to the PDQ system, something they are happy to do as long as they aren’t giving away information their competitors could use against them.
“We had to have some discussions about things and it wasn’t extremely easy, but we got through the issues that came up,” said WGEA executive director Wade Sobkowich.
As the harvest rolls in and farmers switch their attention to sellng grain, they will have a chance to see how well the PDQ site fits into their marketing, said Tom Steve, the AWC general manager.
“This is a long term process,” said Steve.
“We wanted to get version one out there to get feedback from producers and others.”
