Natural Gas and Feed Wheat and Barley

[parsley]

Ycharliep, you say, "Market development is expensive"
Yes it is charliep. At the presenrt time, farmers have check-off.....countless checkoffs.....flax checkoff, cattle checkoff, Western Grains checkoff, and on and on.....I would be very interested to find the amount of total checkoff dollars the producer 'invests' every year in market development. Could you do that?

You also ask, " whose responsibility should market development be?"

Farmers have increasingly been asked to foot the bill for agricultural research because governments are broke!

Vernon Clifford Fowke makes the following observations in his book, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy:

"There is little need to justify the use of taxpayers' dollars for the support of research directed toward the reduction in food costs. To charge the agricultural research budget of the government to the account of the agricultural producer is, however, scarcely legitimate."

Barry Wilson writes in his book, Beyond the Harvest, Canadian Grain at the Crossroads, the following:

"Consumers receive the benefit of food, while farmers often find the financial rewards which should flow from this improvement are lost in the marketplace."

Perhaps farmers need to review:
1. How much farmers invest
2. What we do with what we develop
Thoughts?
Parsley

[charliep]

I can do some research on producer contributions to research via checkoffs. Give me to the end of next week as I am in Oyen/area last half of the week and Peace River early next. I will leave other discussion to others for the moment.

[TOM4CWB]

Charlie,

Innovation and market development are very tricky areas to promote.

The sensitivity to know when a certain idea is a good one requires execeptional wisdom and savy.

I know some folks at the CWB are inteligent and wise, but actually putting your own farm and life on the line is different than collecting a wage.

This is why the CWB can say, and to some extent help market development, but this needs to be a facilitation role, rather than a top down comand position.

Using the pooling accounts to mask reality is a big gamble, and like with CPS White, if the market will not pay a reasonable value for a specialty product, why grow it?

By segmenting our production and trying to become a "grocery store" supplyer, are we doing ourselves more harm than good?

Specialization increases the knowlege needed to provide the best quality, in a sustainable volume that will supply the market place dependably.

If we don't do this for all of the products we produce, How will we acheive premium prices for the substandard products we produce?

Isn't knowing our limitations realistically the base to putting resources in the most productive places, and therefore acheiving the best possible results?

[charliep]

Just a request for some clarification about discussion you are wanting to start Tom.

[TOM4CWB]

Charlie,

I think it is only reasonable that if western Canada is a supermarket for the world, that we concentrate on growing the highest quality products, for the markets and customers we supply.

If we can't supply a premium product, we will not get a premium price!

CPS White is a good example of a CWB marketing initiative that has been a royal flop for us as farmers.

When we dedicate fields to crop, it is a long term commitment, and we need assurances that the customer is really happy with this product, or else if they believe it is just mediocre, like CPS White, then we should grow something else.

CWES is another CWB political disaster and I believe politics has more to do with the marketing of CWES than anything else. SOmeone is bound to be hurt in the process, both farmers and consumers.

Does this help Charlie?

[charliep]

Tom4CWB

You are asking me a tough questions to which there are no easy short term answers. Here goes though. I look at things in terms of time.

Short term - I disagree that we the wheat classes you talk about are not world class. Some of the newer varieties of CPS whites and Glenlea are premium class wheats that have a place in many of our customers wheat blends. The answer to a large extent is continuing as an industry to sell our wheat based on quality characturistics. This involves marketing, sales and followup. Ongoing daily work that needs to be done.

Medium term - Maybe rather than how we handle wheat now where crop is grown and then we hustle for markets, the ag. industry has to start at the sales opportunity end/size of market and produce for our customer. I note from previous threads you grow specialty oil canola. Companies restrict seed supplies such that they only grow the amount they can sell. They are also very variety specific. There is a financial benefit to participating. Warburons program is an example for wheat. Maybe we have to do the same thing for wheat classes like extra strong/Glenlea and white wheats.

Long term - I think it is important that we not limit the classes/special charactic wheats we grow. The world is going to change drastically over the next several years. Given the increase in Brazilian acreage and likely improved agronomy/efficiency in eastern Europe, commodity based pricing is going to remain low. Our competitive advantage is quality and our ability to meet customer needs. Breeding programs don't yield results for at least 5 years so we need to be consistently thinking way ahead. The same thing applies to market development/customer needs accessment.

Just a note, we tend to highlight the negatives in the threads but we have lots of success stories in western Canada. Instituations like the Canadian Grain Commission on the quality and Canadian International Grains Institute/Grain research Lab do a lot for our industry both in terms of accessing customer needs and demonstrating how our grains fit them. An ongoing process.

Others thoughts.

[TOM4CWB]

Charlie,

If Glenlea is still a world class wheat, then why has the CWB discounted it by $28.00/t over the last 3 years?

If we need a CPS wheat with high protein and good gluten strength, why does the CWB not offer a premium for Oslo wheat, which is true to the Dark Northern Spring Wheat class, and should be worth CWRS prices for simular quality.

THe CWB swore at oslo for years, because it was CWRS quality, and it wrecked the CPS noodle quality when it was blended in.

Is see CIGI as an important tool, but far too much politics are involved in our system, and far too few real market signals, the true signals that help us to make good management decisions.

Charlie, don't we need more flexibility, to manage our farms efficiently?

Do you really believe CWB staff are wiser than the customers and grain producers who raise and consume our grain?

Shouldn't the higher US Portland prices, about a dollar a bushel, tell us that something is wrong?

[charliep]

As you can tell from previous threads, I don't necessarily have the answer to your questions. What I am trying to push people to is thinking about what a different system will look like not just for one truck load/farmer but for the industry. Highly regulated or completely open market is the discussion we have been having in these threads. I keep pushing us back to the fact that satisfying customer needs with crops/value added products that provide profit potential are our prime objectives as an industry. We also have to have a look at the structure of our grain handling system/how we move product. The challenge is what the industry look like in ten years.

Just as clarification, remind me about oslo and its quality characturistics. My recollection/memory is that olso was the first prairie spring wheat on the scene - visually distinguishable from hard red spring and a noodle wheat. I never really remember it being all that good a wheat either agronomically or for the market (particularly the domestic feed). Genesis and from there Karma have been much better wheats (particularly the latter). I havenn't kept track of the new CPS white varieties.

The wheats I do remember being similar quality to our CWRS was (still is) Grandin, Marshall and Solar with the issues being not exactly the same quality profile as spring wheat and not visually distinquishable from our other wheats.

I will pass on to others for discussion.

[TOM4CWB]

Charlie,

Oslo was bred and released by Nickersons out of Colorado originally for the Dark Northern Spring Wheat class in the USA.

Because of the high levys in the early to mid 90s, about $.75/bu, it was at a real disadvantage here.

On Agronomics, it still is the strongest strawed semi-dwarf wheat avaliable in Canada today.

We have grown 92bu/ac at 15.8% protein, but who will pay for this protein?

The CWB makes sure the buy-back is punitive enough that I can not afford to even put this wheat in my rotation, and noone else can either.

The result is that the earliest, highest quality CPS wheat, that at times does yeild less than the other CPS because of it's intrinsic higher quality is now dead because of the CWB.

What about Glenlea?

If it is a world class wheat still, why is the CWB telling us that it and all the other newly bred and just released CWES wheats are $28.00/t discounted from the payment spreads 3yrs ago?

This is a total wipe out for the plant breeders who developed the new Glenlea quality varieties, as well as for my Wildcat, which was the highest yeilding wheat at Devon last year!

Who will grow CWES when Crystal CPS in the CWB program pays more money/t?

[charliep]

I throw the challenge back TOM4CWB. What system would you suggest for these alternative wheat classes? Where you are likely disagreeing is that I don't see the answer as simply co-mingling specialty wheat into the regular elevator system (that could be either side of the border). How do we achieve the price premiums some of our specialty wheats deserve?

[TOM4CWB]

Charlie,

I understand Ontario just voted to increase their exemption to 200,000t

If you read thru Ken Nixon's presentation on Jim Chatenay's March 5th meeting, you will see that one comment that Nixon had was that small niche wheat markets were better served by the exemption program.

The Western Grain Marketing Panel Report had simular types of responses.

We must learn to be flexible, and niche markets and the CWB do not mix.

Exemptions are the only real answer Charlie, but I think you know that, deep down inside.

[parsley]

Why is it that "exemptions" are so easy to grant to big feed mills while such an unforgivable concession for producers? Why is it so defendendable... the principle... when it is a large corporation that is "value-adding so-we'll-make...an exception...this time.......",
yet there is a blindspot when applying those same principals to farmers?

Parsley