The main grain markets are down and dreary these days, and lots of ag industry conferences are having trouble finding people to attend.
That’s definitely not the case here in Winnipeg this week, where the Canadian Special Crops Association has got a record attendance of more than 300 people from 24 countries.
Yesterday I took a bus tour with CSCA members and my bus was a United Nations of pulse eaters, with Bangladeshis, Moroccans, Ecuadoreans, Mexicans and plain old Canadians going out to tour Roy Legumex in St. Jean Baptiste and visit a prairie farm at Elm Creek.
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I was talking to some Canadian crop marketers and advisors during the tour and they were saying that the main factor slowing down sales of things like red lentils is that prices are too high, and farmers are holding out for per pound prices to go from 37 cents to 45.
Wouldn’t that be a nice position to be in with the big crops? To have things so good in terms of price that they seem like they can only get better.
The bounding hunger for pulses worldwide has been about the happiest story in the ag markets this year, with none of the gloom sticking to the big crops, which are back in slumpy territory. The CSCA convention rooms are filled with international pulse buyers making deals and forming relationships. Most folks seem pretty serious about what they’re doing here. Few of the participants today seem hungover compared to those at a lot of industry conferences I’ve covered, even though last night was the industry’s big evening reception. That may be partly due to many of the participants here being Muslim and therefore not being too booze-hungry.
But it also seems like everyone is very keen to be alert, to keep transacting the one hot business in an otherwise depressed world of crops.
Things probably don’t seem so joyful to the big Bangladeshi delegation here, because they’re the ones having to pay the big prices for expensive Canadian pulses, but they seem keenly interested in this booming industry.
About the only truly dreary element at the conference has been the weather, which has been rainy, thundery, dreary and cold.
Maybe that’s another reason everyone’s attending the conference, and not skipping out to frolic at The Forks or on golf courses . . .
