Farmers hesitate to market | CWB may have been disadvantaged because program details unknown
Farmers don’t know which grain company will do the best job of marketing their wheat when the open market starts Aug. 1, according to a new survey.
A Blacksheep Strategy poll of 600 prairie wheat growers conducted in January shows 37 percent were not sure who should be handling their wheat.
That is more than double the next highest response, which was Viterra at 18 percent.
Joanna Karman, a business strategist with Blacksheep, wasn’t surprised to see such a high proportion of respondents in the unsure category.
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“It’s a year of transition,” she said. “It’s just early days yet.”
What did surprise her was that only 12 percent chose “a new and different” CWB, which ranked second behind Viterra.
“I thought maybe there would be more people having some confidence that the wheat board would still really be the one with all the expertise,” said Karman.
Keystone Agricultural Producers president Doug Chorney sees the CWB showing differently.
“That’s pretty high when you look at the other rankings,” he said.
Richardson International garnered nine percent of the vote and Cargill rounded out the top four with six percent. The survey is considered accurate within plus or minus four percent at the 95 percent confidence level.
Chorney thinks the CWB may have been disadvantaged because it hadn’t yet released details about its marketing programs in January, while companies like Viterra had already unveiled contracts.
“From what we hear from our members, a lot of people are going to choose to market through the wheat board, providing they have handling arrangements with the delivery points near them,” he said.
Chorney said growers are finding out there are many unknowns when it comes to marketing wheat, such as how to deal with quality parameters like protein and falling numbers. That could be contributing to the high number in the unsure category.
“There’s just so many new things to learn,” he said. “It’s a much more complicated crop to market than canola.”
Karman said only eight percent of farmers younger than 45 selected Viterra compared to 20 percent in the 45 and older categories.
“They were much stronger within the older age groups.”
So was the new CWB, which garnered 14 percent of the vote for farmers older than 65 compared to six percent of those in the younger than 45 category.
Smaller growers also liked the CWB, which received 20 percent of the vote for those with fewer than 1,000 acres compared to seven percent of those with 3,000 or more acres.
Richardson attracted the younger growers, getting the votes of 14 percent of growers younger than 45 versus six percent of all those older than 55. It also did well with smaller growers.
There were no significant differences by size of operation or age for Cargill’s results.
“People often tend to think of Cargill as just appealing to really large farmers, but we didn’t see that come out in the findings here,” said Karman.
Patterson Grain and Parrish & Heimbecker both performed better with Manitoba growers. Karman said that wasn’t a surprise because they have more assets in that province.
Blacksheep will be conducting interviews for a broader study later this month that will explore how the open market may effect production practices such as the types of wheat grown and crop input use, as well as determining who farmers trust for marketing advice.
That study is scheduled to be released April 30.
Karman said the current survey provides a benchmark of farmer opinion on marketing choices. It will be used as a comparison for future opinion polls on the same subject.
