The Western Producer is offering new services that can help you in your marketing.
Timeliness has always been a challenge with a weekly newspaper, but the internet, e-mail and mobile phone technology give the Producer new avenues to deliver information more quickly.
Producermobile.com might be the handiest for farmers who are always on the go.
An increasing number of you have mobile phones and PDAs equipped with a web browser. At Producermobile.com, you’ll find one-stop, free access to a range of market information designed for display on your mobile device.
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The information includes weather and 10 minute delayed futures prices for grain, oilseeds and livestock from the Winnipeg, Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City exchanges.
You can also look up the prices of your favourite stocks.
A feature enables you to create a personal watch list to keep track of the commodities you follow.
You also get a brief comment three times a day from Brugler Marketing on American wheat, corn and soybean markets.
The Western Producer provides an end of day commentary on Winnipeg canola and barley markets, a daily agriculture news story and my weekly Market Watch column.
You also get a markets blog by Ed White, our Winnipeg markets reporter. White’s blog is informative, wide ranging and entertaining. His recent posts range from hog markets to currency fluctuations to China’s restrictions on blackleg that are affecting canola exports.
In addition to his markets expertise, White reads widely and was a history major at university, allowing him to consider market developments in a wider context than simply what is up and down.
White’s blog, the daily canola and barley commentary, weather and a host of other news and information are also on our new website.
Like Producermobile.com, the website has agricultural futures markets prices, and unlike our old site, this feature updates automatically so there will never be out of date prices. As you draw your curser over each commodity, you receive an instant chart of the day’s movements.
Clicking on the name of the commodity gives more detailed information for all the futures months trading, while the ability to obtain historical price charts will be useful if you do technical analysis.
A third feature is rolling out to subscribers who have provided their e-mail address to us. It is a daily e-mail called Markets Moment with the closing futures prices for the agricultural commodities of interest to our readers.
If you are interested in receiving Markets Moment, a free service to subscribers, you can sign up for it on our new website.
Some subscribers who already receive it have asked if we could also provide price information for pulses and special crops.
The system tracks data only from futures markets and there are no futures contracts for pulses and special crops.
For now, you will have to check the paper for the special crops price data we carry, courtesy of Stat Publishing.
The futures market data in these new mobile, e-mail and web features are extracted directly from the exchanges where the commodities trade and follows the conventions of those exchanges, so the canola and barley prices from the Winnipeg ICE exchange are in Canadian dollars per tonne.
The U.S. grain exchanges quote wheat, soybeans and corn in U.S. cents per bushel, soy oil in U.S. cents per pound and soymeal in U.S. dollars per short ton. Livestock futures are in U.S. dollars per 100 lb.
