Farmers often have to take their dealers’ word that they are paying competitive prices for fuel and fertilizer.
Manitoba’s Keystone Agricultural Producers wants to provide numbers to challenge the words.
“We want farmers to be able to know how much inputs cost in Manitoba,” said KAP vice-president Robert McLean.
The farm input market is always translucent, if not opaque, to farmers who aren’t able to call dozens of dealers and receive quotes. There are no reliable real-time market prices for farm fuel and fertilizer, so farmers never know if they’ve paid a good or bad market price.
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KAP won’t be able to provide transparent, up-to-the-minute prices, but it is compiling a survey of Manitoba fuel and fertilizer prices, which it will use to show what farmers are paying and calculate what escalating input costs have been doing to farm families.
McLean said many farmers are bewildered by the huge rise in fertilizer prices since October. From a cost of $460 per tonne for nitrogen fertilizer for his farm, McLean said prices have risen to about $740 per tonne.
Since the basic feedstock of nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas, and natural gas prices are relatively low, this sudden rise in prices doesn’t make sense, he said.
“Dealers say that it’s because of all the extra corn acres that are going to go in the United States, but it makes you wonder.”
If corn acres are stealing from the soybean base, nitrogen fertilizer use will go up, he admitted, and if the fertilizer plants are running short of capacity, prices might have had a reason to rise. However, he said that doesn’t explain why many southern Manitoba farmers are reporting substantially cheaper fertilizer prices in North Dakota compared to Manitoba.
“We want to know why that is.”
The survey is being completed between now and Feb. 26 and can be accessed at KAP’s website at www.kap.mb.ca. Filled-out surveys can be e-mailed or faxed to the KAP office in Winnipeg.
