‘The Wild Oats Grain Marketing Seminar’ was held in Yorkton Feb. 27.
For those attending the one-day event, it was an opportunity to pick up some information and techniques that can be an asset for farmers looking to improve their marketing.
The headline speaker was Harold Davis of Prairie Crop Charts. His presentation focused on the benefits of incremental marketing, about seasonalities in crop prices, while also providing insights into short and long term crop outlooks based on chart action.
Davis said while “every year is different” there are general trends which tend to follow the seasons in terms of influencing crop prices.
The impact on prices can be tracked by charting the average price of a crop on a particular day, and comparing that over a number of years to see if a trend exists, explained Davis.
However, those influences are not the same across all crops. What happens to wheat may not happen to peas, or canola, at the same time in the year.
Overall, crops headed into 2020, as might be expected, are rather varied.
For example oats are well above the five and 10-year averages for the crop, offered Davis.
Wheat tracks higher too, as does feed barley which is “at a high price by historic standards,” said Davis.
Even canola is “a little higher” than the 15-year average, said Davis, but he cautioned “remember how ugly prices were back in 2006.”
Still canola prices are not good, offered Davis.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” he said, adding as it stands “oats look better than canola,” and that just does not happen.
Still there is potential for rallies in canola prices.
Davis said canola markets “out of the blue” rally to tack on $1.50 to prices adding it is one of the strange aspects of the commodity, adding it’s not easily explained. “It’s just the way it is.”
That rally has not happened in a while but it can. “Don’t think the zebra has changed its spots,” said Davis. “It’s not pie in the sky stuff. It’s just the way of the beast.”
While canola numbers look less than stellar, it is not the only crop with low prices.
Yellow peas “are well below average,” said Davis.
Then showing how things do not always seem to track logically, Davis noted green pea prices are much better than their yellow cousins.
Davis also noted that prices are never a forever thing.
“Nothing last forever,” he said, adding in the case of low prices “eventually there is recovery.”
Of course farmers send messages to the marketplace with what they plant, and in some crops relatively small shifts in production can have a rather large impact on prices.
One example of that is with flax “where even a little too much flax it (the price) really drops,” said Davis.
