Truly ugly grain prices

[Ron]

Customer service representative is a fancy name for a grain buyer

SCREW THE CWB (I know its not a cwb post but I love saying it)

[furrowtickler]

Regardless of what all the price quotes are, those prices are far below profit levels. I will be spraying more chemfallow if it does not change. Do not much cah flow for that.

[checking]

Totally agreed.
Another general way to approach the future is to not sell what you have in the bin for less than what it will cost in inputs to replace it. While many will argue that they need every cent for cash flow (no matter what the price is) and that they can't afford to build bins etc.; the truth may be that they also can not afford to not do things differently. The government won't be there in the future to bail everone and everything out.

[jensend]

a couple of interesting links:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5014463.ece

progress.org/fold48.htm


makes you wonder if one strategy might be to sell inventory because if all price levels drop you would have sold high and later be buying low.

[furrowtickler]

I hope that is wrong, b/c if this is the high we might as well just walk away now while the farm is still worth something.

[agstar77]

Now that's the kind of thinking that might mean we have found a bottom.

[jensend]

you could live with these grain prices if inputs fell as well. there are two parts to the income statement. if you're assuming grain prices will rise again i guess you have to assume fertilizer prices will rebound from their recent declines. i wonder how many people are thinking if they can buy forty five cent nitrogen and catch a rise in grain prices they will be doing the right thing. maybe the opposite strategy is correct. maybe the inflation in commodities that everyone is anticipating happened over the last year and we're already into the deflationary part of the cycle.

[bucket]

Not according to Jim Rogers.

[jensend]

to put it another way: a year ago the right strategy was hold inventory and buy inputs into inventory. are we in the same scenario this year? two things say no. the price of fertilizer is falling hard at the manufacturer level, at least, and the price of grain is falling as well so isn't it appropriate to ask if the opposite strategy would work? i don't know but if conditions have changed a producer will need to do things differently. just food for thought.

[jensend]

bucket, jim rogers might be right, he might be wrong. even he doesn't know for sure and he's certainly not saying when the inflation holocaust will occur. he's just willing to make a bet. i don't know if he's right or wrong but i do know it's a different scenario than a year ago. dennis gartman and robert prechter disagree with rogers.

[Zaphod]

Jim Rogers was wrong for five years, then right for six months. Now he's wrong again. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. People who are bullish are always right at some point simply because the market cycles higher and then lower. It always has and always will. But the timing is what gets really tricky unless you have really deep pockets. It's just that bulls are way more popular than bears (who are right just as often as bulls).