Deciding on the CWB

[IAMTHEMOLE]

There is no room wheat because they are too focussed on stealing everyones canola.

[parsley]

Bread and Butter Reasons:


1. Kirk and Ila Torkelson farm organically at Beaubier, Saskatchewan, and in Nov. 2002, found a market for two truckloads of wheat in the American organic market. He needed the money.

If Torkelson lived in Ontario, he would have been granted the required CWB export license, but CWB policy denies licences to Western farmers. and consequently, the CWB wouldn't give him one, saying he must do the buyback. He balked.

The CWB in writing,convinced Torkelson, stating he should get a $8,900 final payment.

He paid $1,430 to do the buyback.

Thirteen months! after his buyback, Torkelson received a bill from the CWB for $4,630, increasing his buyback cost to $6,060, or 30% of the gross income from his sale, with the only
service being rendered was to issue an export licence.

When Torkelson went public, the CWB's organic marketing specialist (who doesn't market organic grain nor do organic farmers want her to), attacked Torkelson in the Western Producer newspaper saying: "It appears that he wasn't following the pool return outlook and he wasn't keeping abreast of what the market was doing. If he had done that, he would have been more aware.

2. Cyril Stott of Brandon, for example, calculated that he lost $13,500 from his 2002 crop in the bottomless-buyback-hole.

3. No less important, but often overlooked, are the organic sales that are actually lost. Dwayne McGregor farms in Chaplan, Sask., and he blames
the CWB's high buyback as a contributing factor behind his lost sale to Japan.

4. Arnold Schmidt near Maple Creek lost his sale to the U.S. because
of the CWB.

Parsley

[lakenheath]

Something is not right.

[wilb]

Where I am, it seems the only thing the local elevator ever wants to take is #1 HRSW. The poorer grades are all sitting in the bins.

[almoy]

We can't move our No 1 here. They are only buying 2 and 3.

[Jman]

Almoy: are you sure your wheat is really no.1 or is the company buying your no.2 wheat as no.1? It could be that your local company may have tendered this grain for later delivery, therefore dont want you to deliver until the tender is required. Just a guess on my part. It seems strange that we cannot move high quality wheat this late into the crop year.

[Jman]

Parsley: I can see your frustration, but this is 4 examples out of potentially 1000's. I know of some guys who did buy backs on red winter a couple of years ago, and they actually made money on the buyback, due to how they timed the markets. And like you, I know of some fellows who did the buy back at the wrong time.

[MBFarmer1]

Thanks for all the great replies guys. Chaffmeister, am reading through the report on choice matters interesting stuff. As far as the buyback goes I have had only one indirect experience and that was quite a number of years ago when fusarium first arrived in MB. The CWB basically could not sell our wheat and told us to pretty much do whatever we wanted with it. We hauled our entire crop just across the line and actually did very well with it vs. getting almost nothing. The onyl difficulties were a "5 dollar per load cash only" fee to US border security. That seemed a little fishy but everyone that was hauling paid it.
Charile, as for what I want in the future.....obviously farms will continue to get much bigger I feel farmers will be hiring more and more porfessional marketing consultants and possibly working together to blend their products, clean them and ship large lots on their own. Basically working to cut out the middleman (line companies). TO accomplish this we need to plug into the markets omehow to learn what is needed out there and make the connections required. Is this the role for a new CWB that is a privately owned company? Maybe?

[almoy]

Graded No 1 by the Grain Commission. They are only buying No 2 & 3 in this area. We have sold some No 2.

[parsley]

Jman,

I could give you so many examples,I could fill pages, but I did chose these few, because I extracted them from the already public domain.

An egregious point is that most of the organic buyback profit ends up in a conventional pool, which a lot of organics cannot access because they do not have permit books.

The second and most important point is that organic growers outside the DA can forward CONTRACT for a year ahead, without fear of a miscalculated buyback disaster.

The CWB have done everything they can to ruin organic profits.

You would think they would be glad to get organic grain out of the country, and Vader has been moaning about overproduction. Permiting traceable amounts of grain to bypass the already overburdened system, helps everyone.

Reasoning with posts become frustrating.

Parsley