Quick – someone come down to the bustling Winnipeg bureau of The Western Producer and give me a slap in the head.
The onset of hot temperatures, tornado warnings, Canada Day, a royal visit and a mosquito-free weekend appears to have made me stupider than usual.
In fact, I can hardly remember last week’s USDA report, which found, if I can remember right, a lot less corn in stock and a lot fewer acres seeded to corn than expected. That’s about all I can recall at this moment.
Read Also
Growth plates are instrumental in shaping a horse’s life
Young horse training plans and workloads must match their skeletal development. Failing to plan around growth plates can create lifelong physical problems.
I can tell you what I actually can remember from the past few days: the Queen’s hat.
As a good, loyal, patriotic Canadian I took my daughters down to the Forks here in Winnipeg on Saturday to see the Queen as she visited the construction site for the Canadian Museum For Human Rights, where she dedicated a stone from the field of Runnymede, where King John signed the Magna Carta and formed the basis of constitutional monarchy. (There’s an 800 year old copy of the Magna Carta on display at the Manitoba legislature this summer. Come on down and see it.) We stood on a traffic bridge overlooking a nearby pedestrian bridge on which the Queen inspected some troops and then walked briskly along to a collection of dignitaries and 25,000 Winnipeggers who had come down to see her. Everyone around us noted how spry she seemed for an 84 year old and her bright pink hat shone forth like the virtuous light of our political superstructure, which has formed the greatest nation in human history: Canada. I ranted on like this to the daughter I was holding, who has the middle name Elizabeth in honour of Her Majesty, but mainly due to the fact that she’s only 15 months old, she ignored most of what I was saying, fascinating as it was. She was, however, very interested in the musket salute of the voltigeurs.
Perhaps the excitement of the mustkets’ BANGS wiped my mind free of all the clutter of corn carryout ratios, oat price moves, wheat acreage estimates and world demand forecasts that I usually carry around in my head like a pile of unpaid bills, but here we are Monday morning and my mind is blank as new computer’s memory. Golly, what do I do about it? Well, how about read a bunch of markets reports? That should do the trick. Thank Zeus the mill of analysis never stops grinding, because these days you can get reacquainted with ag market reality pretty quickly.
(First thing I remembered to remember this morning was that this is the July 4 holiday in the United States, and because they’re busy celebrating their violent overthrow of lawful authority – and our monarchy – they’re too busy to let most of their markets operate. So I’d better not blog about what’s going on in the Chicago market today or I’ll look even stupider than I did last time I made that mistake.)
So, as I sit here at Starbucks sipping my coffee, I am hoping to re-remember what I knew last week about:
1) How the smaller stocks and stocks projections of U.S. corn will affect barley and wheat prices in Western Canada;
2) How the U.S. soybean numbers affect Canadian canola’s outlook;
3) What the impact of above factors is on oats, a crop that has had a great rally, a settling back, and a unique outlook, is now post-USDA. (I notice that oats futures have experienced an about-50 percent retracement of the recent rally. Time for another leg-up?)
4) Whether there are signs of a cross-ag-commodity rally beginning, or if the seeds for such a happy event are merely being sown now, to be (with any luck) harvested later?
Alright, Ed, let’s get informed. Cya. I’ve got a pile of reports to read.
