Recently Kim Kardashian outraged many with her “2sexy2tweet” photo that she tweeted out to the universe.
OUTRAGEOUS!
Well, there was nothing so outrageous at Manitoba Ag Days this year, from a price perspective anyway, as far as I could tell.
But I got the distinct sense that farmers thought new crop canola bids seemed pretty sexy. And sunflowers had become suddenly as unhot as Britney Spears.
It seems unfair for sunflowers to have become so dowdy in producers’ minds this winter – everyone thinks acreage will drop by 20-30 percent this spring – especially when the Manitoba Agriculture profit calculator shows the crop to be the likely most profitable of anything farmers will grow this coming season. But sunflowers bring a lot of baggage with them this year, mainly in the form of huge sclerotinia risk.
And while sunflower prices are sky high – 35 to 36 cents per pound for new crop confecs – everything’s got good prices right now. And it’s easier to market big acreage crops than little ones, so everyone’s running to crops like canola and oats and away from many of the little crops, people were telling me at Ag Days.
It’s not hard to understand why when you hear a number of people talking about sclerotinia problems in sunflowers, then see a sign like this:
That’s a new crop Nexera canola price on offer, and from what I could tell that Bunge booth was pretty busy all Ag Days. The special crops contractors seemed less busy, at least to my lazy eye.
So that, in a totally unscientific manner, is what seemed hot and not to me at this year’s show in terms of crop prices.
