If you’ve recently visited the Western Producer’s website, you may have noticed that the first episode of the second season of Welcome to the Farm Show is now available to stream.
For those of you who haven’t already watched it, go to producer.com to access the documentary series that was shot at Ag In Motion last summer.
You can find all our Ag in Motion coverage here
Read Also
U.S. soy farmers hold bad hand in rigged game
More tariffs, an unlimited peso bailout, a government shutdown, no plan for federal assistance — and farmers are holding a bad hand in a rigged game where the rules change every day.
You can find it at the top of our home page, just to the left of the Western Producer’s logo.
This episode, titled To Store or to Sell, begins with a conversation I had with Paul Brisebois, senior vice-president of AGI, about the company’s effort to meet the grain storage and handling needs of farmers.
The show also has an interview with Ed Broschinski, lead grain market analyst with Cargill, who speaks about market signals, forecasts and the practical storage options available to farmers.
When we were planning the documentary series, we couldn’t have known how timely its release would be.
I recall thinking back in June, when another widespread drought was still possible, that I hoped this episode didn’t offend farmers that hadn’t harvested a decent crop in years.
But here we are, with bin-busting yields being reported in wide swaths of the Prairies and trade disruptions that continue to limit the market access to important customers of Canadian grain.
Grain storage and marketing is a major issue across North America this fall, considering the United States also harvested a huge crop.
A recent report from CoBank’s Knowledge Exchange said that among the top 12 corn-producing states, the U.S. is facing a 1.4-billion-bushel shortage of upright grain storage this year with elevators relying more on bunkers and emergency storage such as ground piles. Last year, those states had a combined 361 million bu. of excess storage.
This situation is made much worse because U.S. farmers are also facing trade disruptions with China as that country stops buying their crops, most notably soybeans.
The Welcome to the Farm Show documentary series is a new way to tell important stories that the Western Producer is experimenting with and that I think you’re going to like.
We worked with professional documentarians to make sure we produced a quality show for our audience.
Farmers can’t know when and where the next trade or transportation issue will arise, but they can move to protect themselves from it with smart approaches to grain marketing and storage.
To Store or to Sell has experts on grain storage and marketing that understand this dilemma that farmers face year after year.
