Just for you three amigos Agstar and Burbert, cchurch.

[chaffmeister]

And ado – why do you think you’re dumb to pay freight and handling to port? How else would you get your grain to customers?

[ado089]

Chaff,
Who paid the shipping on the last vehicle you bought, how about that last load of fertilizer you bought or the computer you're typing on? You did. You purchased them from a place of buisness and brought them home. I don't know about you but my place of buisness is battleford, saskatchewan not vancouver, british columbia.

You also have no idea how the grain industry works. All the companies tender out shipments of grain to buyers. The lowest tender that meets the desired requirements win the tender and the right to deliver on that contract, they then go and procure grain from you and I at that new and improved lower price to fill said contract. Since there's always a few of the 200,000 farmers out there that need money they obtain that grain at pretty much the lowest price they can get away with before no one will deliver. So please correct my flawed thinking on how having six more organizations out there trying to low ball each other is going to be better for my bottom line than just one.

[ado089]

When it comes to grain we are suppliers not customers and anyone in buisness knows that you grind your supplier to reduce costs and increase margins.

[chaffmeister]

So you think a better system would be to have offshore buyers pay you a price FOB Battleford?

Are you suggesting they pay the same price in Battleford as in Vancouver?

Or are you saying they should write you a cheque and come and pick it up - that way they're paying for the freight?

If the CWB sells wheat to China (as if) on a FOB Vancouver basis (picked up in Vancouver), who's paying for the freight? You or the buyer? Does it matter?

[ado089]

Your response show just how conditioned you are to the current system and exactly why you'd get eaten alive in an open market situation. I don't sell my grain to a buyer in family in China or a flour mill in Italy or brewery in St. Louis. I sell my my grain to a grain company or the wheat board, they then sell it to someone else, who sells it to someone else. This concept of being charged for freight, elevation, handling, cleaning and so on until it's processed or consumed is as absurd as you sending Agrium a bill for trucking and the fuel for you auger and rent on the bin, or sending Bayer a bill for seeding their canola. When my grain hits the pit in the elevator that should be the end of my ownership of that grain, from that point forward it's no longer my problem. We've all been trained to beleive it's our grain until it reaches the consumer since british north america act. Step back and look at this situation from a striclty buisness perspective, we let ourselves get nickle and dimed out all our profit and we are still just price takers at the end of the day. Only in agriculture.

[Hopperbin]

Ado I don't agree with you, these six so called grain companies will be trying to sell their goods at the highest price they can and they want to sell and ship as much as they can. How many times have I heard that these grain companies will be undercutting each other till nothing left that is garbage. Also they cannot sell too much on one end without sourcing a percentage on the other or cutting risk my using the futures markets. So it is farmers who decide ultimately the sale. You talk like the grain companies have our grain sold for the whole year and they are fixing our prices. Unless like you, perhaps you just deliver all your grain and take what they give you. Price too high, lose market share, price too low become loser. Customer always right. Make customer happy especially when 10 percent adds a lot to the bottom line.

[chaffmeister]

Having freight, elevation and cleaning deducted from your cheque has nothing to do with ownership. You may think you were trained to think you own the grain until it reaches the consumer, but I'd be willing to bet you just weren't paying attention in that class.

You seem to think that if the deductions weren't there that somehow you wouldn't be paying for them.

Really?!

When I bought the computer I'm using right now, the price I paid was for the computer picked up in that store. The store paid the manufacturer for the computer plus paid freight charges to truck it to the store. Just because I didn't see a freight bill or a freight charge on my invoice, do you really think I didn't pay for the freight?

Sure, the store paid the freight bill, but you can be sure they captured it from me.

Nickle and dimed? Are you serious? The CWB sc****s dollars a tonne off your cheques without you even knowing it and you think by having elevation and cleaning deductions on your cash tickets somehow you're being taken to the cleaners because you're being forced to pay for the services indicated?!

[ado089]

Let's try rephrasing this. The likes of Viterrea, JRI, Cargil(the grain side at least) are not our customers, they are grain handling companies, hence why we get to pay the cost until our grain lands on a boat. They make most of their money handling our grain an charging us for that "service", the rest of their profit comes from margin made on transactions, buying low and selling high. But since they are not the end user and they are primarily grain handling companies, as per our current and any suggested models, they will focus on volume to maximize handling profits. This means handling the highest volume possible and there we are back to the tendering process. I realize this is an over simplification of the process and at the end of the day a market requires a seller as much as a buyer but at the end of the day I don't know of many farmers who will not put in a crop because the price isn't high enough, they may change what they grow but that creates oversupply of something else down the road. Maybe if grain handling and purchasing were divorced we would see a benefit from competition but not with the bastardized system we have now.

[ado089]

Chaff, I am not defending this wheat board, I'm defending the concept.

[ado089]

and thank you for proving my point. You paid the freight and before that the store paid the freight. I'm still not seing where the computer manufacturer paid freight on that computer.