There are good times and there are bad financial times for cattle producers. So far 2014 has been a period of very positive margins. As feeder and live cattle prices have soared higher, the Canadian Dollar and feed costs have lowered quite rapidly. This has put pressure on feedyards to find additional financing requirements in... Read More
Category: Markets
Editor's note: This is the first edition of a new weekly markets column authored by Brennan Turner, founder of FarmLead. Check out www.FarmLead.com for more, and find Brennan on Twitter as @FarmLead. Grains in the first week of March were fairly volatile thanks to the situation in Ukraine standing on a razor’s edge. The market... Read More
Don't shoot the messenger, but if you haven't priced your nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer for this year, things are about to get very ugly. Or uglier. There's really no upside here, unless you happen to have a neighbour with livestock and a manure problem (which you might. Ask around. Don't worry, I'll wait here while... Read More
Its the beginning of February which means it is time for the annual National Cattleman's Beef Association (NCBA) meeting. With the cash market higher and feed prices lower than a year ago, cattle producers are seeing some strong margins and reasons for putting increased cattle on feed. Shaun Haney and Anne Wasko discuss the meeting... Read More
Anyone that has ever fed cattle has targeted a hole in the market to get a better price at some point. Sometimes the hole develops as predicted and sometimes the market adjusts and the hole is no more than a dent. In the first four weeks of January, cattle packers in the US found themselves... Read More
If there's one crop that's been generating buzz this month, it's oats, followed closely by flax. A plugged supply chain for our export markets has several farmers exploring other viable crop options for the 2014 growing seasons. Hot on the heels of this, the federal government recently announced funding for the oat market to re-build... Read More
The Canadian dollar has been very comfortable at par for quite some time. So much so, that it well and truly was the new normal. Recently, however, a few factors have converged to pressure the loonie’s value. The question is, is this a blip or a trend, and who wins and who loses in the... Read More
Nineteen years out of the last 23, you'd have saved money by pre-buying your fertilizer in the fall. Of course, fall application of fertilizer is subject to high rates of losses, potentially negating any savings and having a negative impact on the environment, and storing fertilizer isn't always possible. So, it's not surprising then that... Read More
Explosive. It's the only way to describe beef cash prices out of the U.S. this January. Sure, yes, there was optimism about what 2014 would bring, but no one could have expected this giant jump in prices as the market resumed after the holidays. Need production info? Click here to see all 30 episodes of... Read More
An unattractive basis is meant to discourage grain sales, but what happens when farmers are willing to sell even then (cash is getting tight, y'all) but bids disappear entirely? Then you have the grain marketing mess that is early 2014. Hear more: Check out all our coverage from CropSphere 2014 Chuck Penner (@LeftFieldCR), with LeftField... Read More