The Alberta Wheat Commission launched a program this winter to make Canada’s grain market more transparent.
A Manitoba farmer is now arguing that farmers might need a similar information portal for another agricultural commodity: fertilizer.
“I think every farmer would want more transparency in this market,” said Dustin Williams, who farms near Souris.
Like many farmers, Williams calls fertilizer retailers in his region to gather information and negotiates a price with a dealer of his choice.
This informal system may lead to a reasonable price for urea or anhydrous ammonia, but “reasonable price” often depends on what other people are paying.
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Williams said access to information on fertilizer prices outside of his area would help him negotiate the best possible deal with local distributors.
Alberta Agriculture publishes monthly average prices for farm inputs on its website, including prices for urea and anhydrous ammonia, but the Manitoba and Saskatchewan governments do not.
Bob Friesen, vice-president government affairs with Farmers of North America, a farm business alliance with more than 10,000 farmer members in Canada, said the issue is much larger than a lack of information on retail prices. He said the entire fertilizer trade is difficult to decode.
“There is no price transparency (for fertilizer),” he said. “It’s non-existent.”
Friesen said farmers can call around to local fertilizer retailers, but information on the industry is scarce.
“Typically, farmers wouldn’t know what the cost of producing a tonne of fertilizer is,” he said. “They wouldn’t know what the blending and handling margins might be, or what the retail margin might be. That information just isn’t available.”
Friesen said multiple factors affect fertilizer pricing, and some of them don’t make sense.
He attended a sugar beet growers meeting this winter in Taber, Alta., where he spoke to a farmer about nutrients.
“(He) said, ‘it doesn’t matter that I’m getting my fertilizer from a local supplier, they are now increasing the price because the Canadian dollar has dropped.’ ”
Gary Smart, a Manitoba Agriculture business management specialist in Somerset, said farmers should dedicate more time to fertilizer prices because it is the most expensive input for grain production.
“Typically, fertilizer accounts for roughly 30 percent of total operating costs for most crops,” he said at a recent young farmers conference in Brandon. “The timing of fertilizer (purchase) is probably just as important as keeping track of where the commodity markets are.”
For example, Williams said he will spend more than $120,000 this year on nitrogen fertilizer for his 5,000-acre farm.
He may want to install a smartphone app for crop input prices to potentially lower that cost next year.
FNA launched an app last spring called AgPriceBook, where Canadian farmers can post prices on fertilizer, herbicide, inoculants and other inputs.
“Farmers need more tools for cost competitiveness by discovering what prices are in other locations, including other provinces and across the country,” Friesen said last April.
“The more we can do for farmers to learn about and compare prices, the better off they are.”
A representative of Push Interactions, the app developer, said 1,000 to 2,000 people have downloaded the AgPriceBook app.
The Western Producer contacted the Canadian Fertilizer Institute for this story, but it didn’t respond by press time.
