Bruce Burnett, CWB Gives His 2011 Wheat and Durum Outlook

[shaney]

<p style="text-align: center;"></embed></object>

[bucket]

He should have been fired last april.

What happened to that one year supply of durum bruce? Gave it away for nothing after farmers stored it for you. When this interview was done the cwb was making sales to algeria at those preferrential discounts.

He is nothing short of tits on a bull. And the cwb should sell the weather department to environment canada. Why should farmers in western canada pay for a weather service??

[parsley]

Don't be insulting bulls. They usually get the job done.

And yes, for all the spend-the-money CWB directors reading this thread, get rid of the weather service. It's a waste of FARMERS' money.

Without his job as Manager of Canadian Weather, it would seem Burnett could rake in the dollars as Official Taster of HRSDonuts Inc. in Hohhot. Pars

[newguy]

CWB has no right to use farmers money to forcast weather. And do horrible job doing it . Way too much of that already in Winnipeg.

[TOM4CWB]

Folks,

I think the CWB 'weather service' is great!

They clearly define the CWB's effectivness in doing their job; and give... for all to see... a transparent window on CWB management.

What else do you expect... forcasting the weather is almost exactly the same as predicting future grain prices!

The CWB does both equally well!

[checking]

Time and again the CWB has shown us that it has no idea what is going on weather-wise in our competitor countries. It either sells us out on the lows, or holds our wheat back on the highs, and I'm not referring to weather fronts! This weather technology, if it's any good, should be given to our competition so the CWB can determine how their crops are fairing.

[bucket]

The buyers of our grain have all the weather info they need as well as people on the ground checking crops.

Canada is a free country, buy a ticket to canada and start driving around and a foreigner could see our crops were the shits this year. A crop guy would report back to his country that it should get some business done with the cwb while prices are cheap. Oh wait, the chinese did that last June.

Or another great idea is to put an import tariff on durum and force the price of durum down until you need it - great algerian trick.

The cwb is incompetent. Plain and simple. Those special relationships they have built with their customers have cost us greatly just in the last year.

[bucket]

parsley

I was insulting the bull, just the usefulness of tits on a bull.

And you are right, if brucie went on a diet it looks like he could put a couple of donut shops out of business.

But then again, putting people out of business is his and the cwb's M.O.

[bucket]

Should have read like this on my last post.

I wasn't insulting the bull....


Wish we could edit our posts.

[charliep]

Just curious in what Bruce said you found inaccurate? I thought
Bruce's outlook was pretty optimistic and not much different than what
others are saying.

How well does everyone here understand the pricing pace? It is a
policy approved by the CWB board of directors, established by them at
the beginning of the crop year, monitored during the crop year and
finally used as a performance measure in the annual report. If you
want to change the concept of pricing pace, you have to convince the
b. of d. to change policy or hope for a change in the CWB act.

[checking]

Perhaps it's the media's advanced reporting fault, but it appears to me that serious weather events and their effects on world crops always grab CWB attention a month after everyone else understands the ramifications. How do these buyers comprehend what our hired guns fail to grasp? Just once it would be nice to see them ahead of the curve.

[vvalk]

when it comes down to it why do they need any departments. Take weather. Even if they see russia drought coming and too much rain in western Canada. They see how dry it is in the US, so on and so on. What do they do? Sell essentially 1/12th every month like its mandated. They need 50 people at the call centre to take all the pissed off farmers phone calls. Having PRO's come out ONCE A MONTH in a market like this and 2008. The government is talking now about innovation, the CWB couldn't be more opposite.

[parsley]

Does the CWB Weather Surveillance itself compile the statistics of farmers recording the amount of rainfall in their crop insurance areas, or does the CWB now forward it to provincial crop insurance to compile the reports? Anyone know?

Payments (incl approximations, verifications, etc) depends upon weather..hail, rain.

It's a downloaded cost.

Also, does anyone know if CWB weather information is sold? To whom? On which line on the annual report?

Is it given away to anyone, including governments? Pars

[btjadenlepp]

that's the point i wonder about vvalk -
does a change in the forecast (weather or
prices) ever alter the 2%/week sales
policy? if not then how is the intel
leveraged to improve marketing
performance? if anybody knows for sure one
way or the other, please enlighten us.

[Kodiak]

I used to think if all that drives the sales desk at the CWB is a program of 1/12th per month, all they needed was a monkey, not four or five hundred people. I've changed my mind. A $400 unmanned laptop, live and online with the stocks numbers and a programmed sell pace of 1/12 per month is all we need. A monkey needs to be fed and watered. Too expensive. A laptop is cheaper. A change like this they call "right sizing".

Now how do we get the cost of the BoD in line? Do we really need a board of 15 to surpervise a computer? The per diems, nice hotels, and travel will be a hard habit to break.

A thought.... What would the net present value of the next 10 years of salaries and perks for the Board of Directors be?