Price impact?
To the Editor:
All the attention this fall has been focused on low initial grain prices. I am just wondering if these new grain prices will mean new combines and tractors will start to get weather-checked tires on dealer’s lots. Last time I asked my local dealer, he was sold out until 1998 sometime.
Perhaps some of your readers could enlighten me on how it is possible to be buying these $200,000-plus machines with prices at their current levels.
In other industries, sales of new equipment dry up when the price of the produced product goes down. What am I missing here?
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Until new equipment sales reflect prices and people quit gobbling up more and more land and more land sits idle, don’t expect a whole lot of changes in the status quo.
– Lawrence Gutek,
Hendon, Sask.
Grain exercise
To the Editor:
As an editor of an important farm paper, here is a simple exercise you should do. Just take a small sample of wheat, durum or barley with you the next time you are traveling to Ontario or the Northern U.S. Any grade will do but low-grade grain will be most interesting.
Stop in at an elevator and find what its value is at world market prices. This would be an apples-to-apples comparison.
You will find that it is worth substantially more outside then inside the “island of low prices” known as the CWB buying monopoly area of Western Canada. We compared these for a year and found our prices as much as 58 percent lower. From then on you will be more familiar with the price comparisons. If you were a farmer, you would ask: “Why can’t I get those same price bids right at home at local competing elevators or processing plants? I need the full value of my grain to survive.”
Any farmer who has done this simple exercise has come home with more questions: Where is the return for our 10-25-percent lower-yielding varieties that cost so much to grow?
Why do I have to incur all the costs of storage and interest created by the CWB quota system?
Why is the price discount so much wider yet for off grade grain here?
How can I manage my small business without hedging full cash pricing or pre-pricing choices like farmers have in a free grain market?
Why is there virtually no local processing to save me freight costs like there is in North Dakota and Ontario?
You owe it to your readers to do this exercise (if you have the courage) and report back to them because they are facing the very real challenges of farming.
Mr. Editor, when you or anyone has done this and when you’ve dealt with the five questions I have posed, you too will become a dual marketer.
– Jim Pallister,
Portage la Prairie, Man.
Commie view
To the Editor:
In response to Mr. Fairbairn’s communist view on grain marketing in the west (Aug. 28 issue of Western Producer), let’s compare apples to apples. These price studies you talk about do compare same protein levels.
Also, grading in the U.S. is done by test weight and moisture, as well as, of course, protein. That, by the way, is how wheat is sold in this country, but in various circumstances is not always bought that way.
Many farmers across the west can attest to this fact.
Also, isn’t grain marketing about trying to get the highest price possible for your product? For instance, how about hedging in a futures contract to control risk? If the CWB continually does this, shouldn’t that be reflected on farmgate prices?
As for dollars-per-bushel comparisons, Garry, you forgot one important factor. A farmer could get over $5 per bushel now off the combine, in an open, true-to-life market. Yet our inferior wheat is worth $2.25 per bushel now with a promise for more in January 1999. Seems like every year those promises are broken.
– Alex Herle,
Neilberg, Sask.
Handling pigs
To the Editor:
I’ve been getting the Producer for many, many years and enjoy it and appreciate many articles in it (also Western People).
You carried several “pig” articles in August.
Today I was reviewing an article in “Country Canada” (TV production) carried this summer on a pig farmer near Hope, B.C.
The two clicked as maybe the second being a possible answer to both the smell and nitrate problems of the farmers.
The man … has a system to his pens (probably including ventilation to guide pigs where to manure) so they “push out” their own manure and have “happy” pigs. They also have a composting operation connected to get rid of the nitrates and they have safe “composted fertilizer” as an end product.
You may also want to alert the provincial Agricultural Departments of the five Western provinces for them to consider in guiding mega pig farms in each province, as well as the farmers about whom you had articles or carry an article in your paper on it.
– H. E. Fruson,
Kelowna, B.C.
Combine beer
To the Editor:
I was disturbed this summer when I opened the Canadian Wheat Board annual calendar.
I was flipping through the pages enjoying the lovely farm photos when I reached the September 1998 page.
In this photo there are two combines with five men posing in front.
What bothered me was the fact that there are three Labatt’s Lite beer bottles in the cab of the one combine.
I am concerned about the message that this is sending people, especially our young people.
I most certainly hope that this is not a common practice among fellow farmers at harvest time.
I found this picture to be inappropriate for a Wheat Board calendar.
Things like this should be more closely looked at before they are published.
Our family farms as well, and we realize and respect the fact that alcohol and machinery do not mix.
– Shelley Schlosser,
Cudworth, Sask.
