Tag Archives Commodities — page 9

There are two ways of looking at this chart: 1) It sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks and sucks; 2) Thank heaven! Number One applies to all those who have a bunch of canola growing out in the field and don’t have a lot priced. A lot of farmers didn’t feel comfortable locking in many prices […] Read more

I believe I have finally proven (to myself at least) my long held theory that my body and well-being are completely attuned to the markets. I say that because last week I pulled my back Tuesday, forcing me to lie on the couch aching, whining and eating Robaxacet, and this situation of woe was compounded […] Read more

Did anyone care much about this week’s Statistics Canada reported on what farmers seeded this spring? Not really. The fat canola number got some attention, but even though this is usually a carefully parsed report, the wet and wild seeding conditions this year mean everyone is radically adjusting their expectations of what farmers actually got […] Read more

E. Cora Hind was famous for being able to peg the prairie wheat crop in a time in which guesstimates were usually way WAY off. Good solid sense, agronomic understanding, observational powers and the willingness to drive hundreds of miles made Hind, the agriculture editor for the Winnipeg Free Press, a world famous crop forecaster. […] Read more

Wanna see a rough approximation of reality? Here’s one: That is a portrait of yours truly as interpreted by Noella, my three and a half year old daughter, last night at dinner. If you knew what I actually look like, you’d probably think it’s a fairly close approximation of me, but rough and not entirely […] Read more

I thought Peter Hall, the chief economist of Export Development Canada, put it nicely when he summed up for me in an interview last week the very odd and unsettling point we’re at right now, with recession just behind us, weak economic performance in front of us, a lot of problems just down the road, […] Read more

As we head towards the second half of 2011, the crop production picture of northern hemisphere crops looks pretty up-in-the-airy, leaving supply outlooks a little confused, as a bunch of crops could either recover from early struggles, or slump if stressors go on much longer. But the picture seems far more murky for demand, and […] Read more

Yesterday a pile of people from throughout the Winnipeg grain trade listened avidly to the Canadian Wheat Board’s early season crop production and progress presentation. Analysts from all sorts of places were there, from grain companies, farmer groups, commodity organizations, federal and provincial government departments. That makes sense, because there is no better way to […] Read more

SHOUT IT, SHOUT IT, SHOUT IT OUT LOUD!!!!!!! That appears to be the strategy being taken by the Manitoba government, the Port of Churchill, Keystone Agricultural Producers and the Canadian Wheat Board’s pro-monopoly directors, who jointly announced a provincially-funded advertising campaign Monday to attack the federal government’s vow to break the board’s marketing monopolies. Representatives […] Read more

Here’s a portrait you probably won’t want to hang in your living room: This weed was happily soaking up the sunshine on one of the many, many unseeded fields I came across yesterday as I drove across a wide swath of central and Interlake Manitoba. I saw lots of alarming and ugly things, and tonnes […] Read more