Gotta hand it to John Duvenaud and the Wild Oats markets newsletter:
They called the prairies’ apparently reduced canola acreage this spring reasonably correctly. On March 10, when Agriculture Canada and a number of analyst/advisors were predicting level or increased canola acres, a casual survey of the Wild Oats readership brought these two main conclusions:
1) Canola was going to be down.
2) Wheat was going to be up.
Sure enough, at least as far as Statistics Canada could gather in March, prairie farmers intend to plant substantially less canola and substantially more spring wheat. Instead of Ag Canada’s guess of 17.2 million acres, farmers were planning to plant 15 million.Â
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I asked John on Monday about why his readers produced results that were quite far out of mainstream analyst thinking in early March, but turn out to have been more correct.
“My readers are regular, real farmers,” he said, although he also noted “but isn’t that who everybody talks to?”
Regardless, that little, casual, non-scientific survey seemed to be pretty accurate this year so far. It’ll be interesting to see how it does next year.
Another good call was made by my colleague Sean Pratt a few weeks ago, when he decided to reexamine the Ag Canada canola acreage forecast made in early March by calling some of the folks who actually sell canola seed and inputs. They were pretty skeptical of the plus-17 million acreage forecast, with a Bayer officially suggesting 15.8 million acres was more likely. Dekalb was forecasting about 15.5 million. Those are obviously pretty informed or pretty lucky observers of farmers’ seeding intentions, because they came pretty close to the mark, especially if farmers, as they tend to, increase their canola acres a bit from their early March intentions.
Errol Anderson of Pro Market Communications also made a good call on this one. In Sean’s April 16 story Errol said he thought Ag Canada had overestimated by one to two million acres. That makes him pretty right too.
I’m sure there were other folks on the right side of this equation, but these are just a couple of examples I’ve come across as I sort out the mess of papers on my desk and consign stuff to the recycling box. Up came an old Wild Oats newsletter and a photocopy of the April 16 story in our paper.
One thing I’m making sure to put aside and to not recycle is early 2009 predictions for how the ag and other markets will behave in the coming year. Near the end of December every year all the prognosticators trot out their predictions and I tend to write a story or two about them. Usually I try to dig up their last-year’s predictions, to see how right or wrong they’ve recently been, but that’s a real pain to do if they’re not all set aside. Now that I’ve set them aside, and saved them from the blue box monster, I’ll probably forget to do a story. I wonder if my forecast about this will turn out to be true.
