The Alberta Wheat Commission’s new PDQinfo.ca crop price listing service offers an extremely simple glimpse of elevator bids across the Prairies.
But is it anything new? Is it useful? Is it worth the money that the public and farmers put into it?
There are rational and intuitive ways of looking at that question and I tend to favour the intuitive approach.
Rationally, one could argue there’s nothing new here, it’s not really useful and it wasn’t worth the money.
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Is it new?
The way it gathers and lists grain elevator prices is new to Western Canada, but there are oodles of other sources. I get a dozen newsletters that list various forms of crop prices and many carry greater detail than the Price and Data Quotes site.
So in a general way, the PDQ site has little new to offer.
But does the site provide anything a farmer can act on that he didn’t have before?
The PDQ site does offer a quick way to see averaged grain elevator bids in various large regions, but doesn’t list prices at specific delivery points or actual prices paid. Nor does it provide the discount and premium schedules applied to the bid prices.
Even farmers who don’t already get market newsletters listing cash price could phone five places and get bids, and ask their friends in other locations what prices are in their areas.
So it’s hard to say that numbers taken from the PDQ website provide information farmers could act boldly upon.
However, these rational factors don’t address whether the site is useful.
I’ve talked with several farmers about it, and it appears the site is useful simply because they like it and find it easy to use.
Sure, any farmer who takes a hard-nosed approach to marketing won’t find much here he won’t find in greater detail with better analysis elsewhere.
But that doesn’t apply to many farmers who are uncomfortable with marketing and give it a low priority.
For them, and this includes many smart farmers who just don’t like marketing, PDQ’s cash and deferred prices enable them to quickly and painlessly figure out where crop markets are at at
a particular moment, which might allow them to act more progressively with their pricing and marketing decisions.
Some farmers also seem to like the fact that this source is a farmer organization and the numbers come directly from grain companies, yielding data they can compare with newsletters and other price sources.
That’s my hope here; that this service provided by the AWC provides a complement to the other existing and future sources of price information. It offers a trustworthy baseline.
Some might note that a lot of money seems to have been spent on something that seems pretty darned simple.
To me that’s OK. It’s harder to engineer simplicity and usability than to create complexity. Simplicity appears to be a major reason for the PDQ site’s success and it’s likely that a good chunk of the funding was paid to make the service user-friendly and clean.
There’s not really much new here, perhaps, but as the first farmer and farm leader I called about this said in a story I wrote two weeks ago: “I like it.”
To me, that’s validation enough.
ed.white@producer.com
