Question: What do High-Fi stereos, complex computer and internet systems, and grain terminals in Poland and Mexico have in common?
Answer: They all seemed like the pathway to the future at one time.
Question: What do Ipods, smartphones and old elevators in the U.S. Midwest have in common?
Answer: They became, or seem likely to become, the real future.
I was thinking about this just now as I crawled through a recoring of a presentation the president Riverland Agriculture gave at the Prairie Oat Growers Association convention a couple of weeks, in which he described how his company, owned by a U.S. hedge fund called Whitebox, took advantage of a long-ignored opportunity to profitably store oats in the Minneapolis-Duluth region, which is the delivery zone for the Chicago oats futures contract. None of the big grain companies was interested in piddly little oats, so Whitebox stepped in and created something that not only brings it profits, but also provides a service that all oat growers have desperately needed, and which may in the end keep the oats futures contract alive.
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It was pretty weird in 2006-07 when Whitebox began buying-up old grain elevators in the Midwest, but often the developments of the future have nothing in common with our visions of what they’d be, even just a few years before. It made me recall endless hours I spent in the 1980s in my buddies’ parents’ basements and at their apartments ogling over their many-component stereo systems, which had developed out of the early “High Fi” systems of my parents’ generation. My buddies would impress me with all the buttons and lights and thingies on their graphic equalizers, and the many carefully positioned speakers that would create the full musical experience with which to listen to the krapp they liked. Remember that Maxell ad? The guy in the chair?
Yeah, that’s him! Anyhow, all of us thought that stereos in the future, like way far ahead like after The Year 2000, would be even more complex and elaborate and have even more thingies on them, with more lights and stuff.
Well, golly, here we are living in the future, and what I seem to see if everyone going Low-Fi. Everyone’s got an Ipod, and they tend to use it as a stereo at home by putting it into a simple little Ipod dock and hearing the digital music played through two tightly connected speakers. No one cares or even thinks about sound quality any more, except for through the surround sound they have attached to their TVs. Music just isn’t considered that important, that holy, any longer. If I could jump back in time to 1982 and tell my friends in Grade 10 what we’d be listening to music with in the future, and how nobody cared about carefully balancing the sound any longer, they’d assume I’d been smoking some of that low-THC product that was popular with delinquents at the time.
I wonder now how the internet’s going to evolve now that many people, especially the under-30 crowd, seem to use their smartphones for everything. I tend to use my Blackberry to access the internet just as often as I use my computer. And I get frustrated with big, fat sites that take a million years to load onto the BB. I love the mobile sites that come up right away and quickly give me what I need. That includes Bloomberg Mobile, CNBC mobile, Globe and Mail mobile, New York Times mobile and – yes, the best I have saved for last – Western Producer mobile. (www.producermobile.com) We have a great new website at the Producer, but I’ll bet in the end the mobile site is the one that will get the most traffic, because you can access it anywhere, anytime. If you haven’t checked it out on your phone, check it out. I wonder if simpler internet sites like mobile sites will become dominant a few years from now, as people spend more and more times using their phones to connect. It’d be another development few would have thought possible a few years ago, something that goes in the opposite direction to where we thought we’d be going.
That brings me back to Whitebox, grain elevators in the Midwest, and grain terminals in Poland and Mexico. Every farmer out there will remember how in the 1990s Saskatchewan Wheat Pool planned to become an ag giant by building major facilities in Poland and Mexico. If I remember right, those didn’t work out too well for the company, but many thought they were a good idea at the time. And most would have thought it was a natural direction for a grain company to evolve.
Funny how Whitebox, with no grain company experience, took the far duller, smaller and more humble approach of buying unloved elevators and using them to store boring old oats right on the prairies’ doorstep, an opportunity nobody else wanted. They showed what we’ve learned with Ipods and smartphones: the future can be smaller and cooler.
