Avon-lee durum

[just_wondering]

I was just @ the WCWGA supper at the FP show in Regina,and listened to the CEO of Farm Pure. Trenton Baisley and he talked of durum buyers prefering Avonlee Durum because it lost colour easier so millers could buy it at a 3 amber durum and not lose any milling qualities could one of the anybody tell me why as a country Canada is still using HVK and as a grading factor and why it will take the CWB untill 2007 to do anything about it. How is selling to milling quality cheaply maximizing returns to farmers?

[TOM4CWB]

just-wondering

If you had a monopoly to sell Rolls Royces... and there was nothing stopping you from selling at Lada prices... and it didn't cost you anything:

Why wouldn't you?

Wouldn't it make your job easier?

[just_wondering]

I will try to be more specific
Farm Pure was talking of value chains and the inability to design a crop with very specific traits to be used by one user through-out the chain everything must be comoditized. and when you are selling commoditys buyers buy for as low as they can and prices only improve in when shortages exist. Breeders do not want to put the investment into novel traits because if only quaker has this very good very specific trait then general mills will block it during registration. I must be missing something to not be seeing why things are so complicated.

[melvill]

just_wondering - interesting handle - my understanding was that high quality pasta had a light amber colour. Consumers, or should I say, consumers that are particular about their pasta, don't like light coloured or nearly white pasta. Now that doesn't mean that some producers don't produce light coloured pasta to fill a lower-priced market niche.

Can someone fill me in?

[Pulseman]

1. Value chains are only interesting to buyers if it fits their needs, normally this means price, since the can get what the want nearly everywhere in the world.

2. breeding is of two typs, by exident (some) or by special, to the point direction, for the later the costs increase expotentialy the bigger the difficulty to breed for it, hence the returns need to be calculative or it will not be done. Some one will breed for 100 million acre corn, but bail out for 3 million acres durum where the farmer will sell brown bagged seed.

3. special traits can be overcome by a 1000 or more helpers, addetivs etc. Example: yellow flour gets bleached, white flour gets a little more egg yolk, bingo. Bakers need to turn out the same color, taste etc. all the time and give a rats behind about our, farmers weather problems.

Oh, for the none believers: we export Ag products for over 40 years and I have lost the believe in the value chain, it is none existing. Many example exist, where someone had the nice idea to use his own product to value add, once he needs more then he can produce the loyalty to his surounding area is gone and only the price matters. This came true for sunflower seed for x Alberta Co, now coming from the US, the barley industry, feed lots, mills and so on and so on.

Face it: only price matters, the rest will be fixed.

Blend some cheap winter wheat into the flour from 15,5 % HRSW to bring the flour production price down.