I caught myself yesterday, on our weekly final deadline day, wondering why I should write three stories I was working on.
What, really, is the point, methought.
I didn’t think this because there wasn’t a good point to be made by each story, but I’d created some caveman charts of my own to demonstrate the points I wanted to make, and I’d been discussing them all morning with our Art Director, Michelle Houlden, as she worked the charts into a publishable form.
The reason I wondering about the pointfulness of the three stories was that the charts themselves pretty much summed up the important stuff I wanted to point out. Did they really need stories to be wrapped around them? (I forbid anyone who is reading this from telling Michelle I was thinking this word-disloyal stuff. Graphic artists and art directors are part of a sometimes-hostile tribe that word-scribblers like me have to fight with for space around the waterhole.)
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In the end, I realized that the stories themselves are necessary, to flesh out the salient point and set it in context, so don’t fear that I have abandoned the written word for the graphic just yet. But crickey, a chart can tell a markets story effectively almost by itself.
Anyhow, I thought I’d share some of my caveman stuff with you here, and you can see the grown-up forms of the graphics done by Michelle when you get the paper on Thursday or Friday.
Here’s a chart showing why canola growers feel disappointed with canola prices, even though they are – in historical terms – sky-high.
When you’re reading all day about the magnificent soybeans rally, you can be forgiven for being a little peeved that your vegoil crop isn’t enjoying nearly the same run.
And here’s my attempt to show why canola prices relatively suck, but soybeans are roaring ahead:
Soybeans are mostly a meal crop, so when meal prices go up soybeans go way up. Canola is mostly an oil crop, so when oil is mostly flat so are canola prices.
Here’s my attempt to sketch out why many hog producers are back to making big losses with every pig they market, and why no one in the U.S. wants to buy weanlings:
Feed (corn prices in black) gone way high. Hog prices (Chicago lean hogs in green) slumped lower. Equals big losses when you buy lots of feed and sell lots of pigs. That’s a deadly combo for pig profitability.
(I handcrafted these charts at barchart.com, but I am solely reponsible for all the messiness)
