If you got a crop this year, last year, the year before that and the one before that, you’re probably feeling a little like Captain Canuck right now.
Prices have been sky-high compared to history, and year after year the commodity markets come back to push grain and oilseed prices up again and again. If you get a good crop and can’t make money now, you’re in the wrong business.
It hasn’t been this good since the 1970s, when farming seemed the path to riches, Saskatchewan and other farm-heavy parts of the prairies were booming . . . and most of the rest of the world was doing badly.
Anyone remember the Vietnam War? Watergate? Stagflation? Britain getting bailed out by the IMF in 1976? Jimmy Carter? The Khymer Rouge? Country-rock? The Iran hostage crisis? Nothing but bad stuff outside Canada, it seemed.
But in much of Canada everything seemed great, due mostly to booming commodity prices like those enjoyed then by farmers. Crop prices shot up in the early 1970s and good times came. That’s when Captain Canuck, the comic lovingly revealed above, was first issued and this journalist – an impressionable nine-year-old at the time – snatched it up and didn’t have trouble believing the premise laid out in its inaugural issue:
“The predictions of Canada becoming the most important country in the world became a reality in the 1980s. This posed new threats and problems for Canada’s leaders and for the countries that depend on Canada’s supply of natural resources. Thus C.I.S.O. (Canadian International Security Organization) selected two men of unequaled physical and mental prowess to be trained as special super-agents.”
Wow, that was exciting stuff.
And with Montreal hosting the Olympics the following year, Pierre Trudeau seeming temporarily cool to everyone’s mom, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive ruling the airwaves, it didn’t seem that far-fetched, even to grown-ups.
There’s a similar feeling of lazy optimism across Canada right now, especially across the West, and I can’t get over how early-70sish it seems. And it’s all due to high commodity prices. I’m eagerly awaiting a new iteration of Captain Canuck to be released to solidify my belief that we’re reliving the 1970s. Because I’m still playing with the notion that we’re actually reliving the 1930s, but just haven’t realized it yet.
The lesson I’ve learned from studying commodity market history, and which I’ve endlessly repeated to anyone who’ll listen, is that commodity prices rise high and stay strong – moving into a much higher trading range – during long commodity booms like the 1970s, but collapse and stay low during depressions, like that of the 1930s.
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So far we’ve had years of high commodity prices, so this seems much more like the 1970s on that count. The 2008 financial market collapse seemed a lot like the 1929 situation but there were financial crises in the 1970s too, so that isn’t definitive. So I’m still sitting on the fence about which decade we’re reliving.
I’m thinking about all this because of the booming crop market news I’m covering, and all the grim economic news coming in from everywhere else. The big word in the markets this year is “headwinds,” but that isn’t stopping corn and soybeans from pushing hard into them and getting higher and higher. Hopefully canola, oats and spring wheat will echo that phenomenon, because they have been weaker than the giant American crops, but even with today’s prices prices are historically wonderful.
Commodity markets and crop markets went through a bad patch in August and into September as everyone got scared about Europe unravelling, the U.S. slumping and China blowing apart, but once more things have settled down a little and commodities are recovering, or like with corn, flying out of the ballpark. This is the commodity “wall of worry” that prices can climb. As each worry fades away, or minimizes to manageable dimensions, and economic growth continues, commodity prices can climb back up again.
Farmers should have years of generally high crop prices ahead of them as long as we can walk along atop the Wall of Worry and not fall off into depression.
So as we head into an autumn of strong crop prices and better than expected harvesting conditions, I hope you all feel as strengthened and invigorated as the fellow below in this 1975 ad, which is how I imagine I seemed after reading each Captain Canuck adventure and imagining a future of Canadian supremacy.
