CWB supporters please help me out with something

[Fransisco]

Every single year since we've had them the basis levels on the fixed price contract were out to lunch.

Every single year the final pool returns are below the average open market selling price.

How many years of sub-par performance do you need to see before you detect that the pattern isn't changing?

[Fransisco]

Forget about getting the highest price, hows about just hitting the average every once and awhile?

[Fransisco]

Scratch that, if I'm forced to sell my wheat and barley to the board under penalty of imprisonment then they better darn well be getting me the best price year after year. Below average just doesn't cut it.

[Jagfarms]

Adam Smith
A voluntary cwb would not survive.

The CWB has no assets such as grain handling facilities because the legislation that governs the CWB limits its ability to purchase assets The same legislation also requires and obligates grain companies to provide handling services for board grains. In an open market, grain companies would not have a legal obligation to provide handling services to the CWB. Since they would be able to sell wheat and barley to customers, and earn money on each sale, they’d actually have an overwhelmingly clear incentive to not co-operate
with the CWB. They would be head-to-head competitors with an entity that has no assets, no regulatory power and therefore, no market power. What benefit would such an entity offer farmers?

Without elevators, terminals and other facilities, the CWB would effectively be sidelined from the game. It would be like trying to play hockey without a stick and skates.

[chaffmeister]

Why is it that the Borg thinks you need to sell rye at $12/bu or red lentils at 50 plus cents to equate or outperform the CWB?

Whenever guys talk like that I sense they think marketing is a game - much like poker. They approach it from the angle of attempting to pick the tops. The irony of this is as Fransisco said – the CWB pool returns are less than average, not even close to the top.
Marketing is best approached from the perspective of first, covering costs and second, locking in reasonable margins. Ironically (again) the CWB’s approach considers neither. Nor does it attempt to pick the tops.

So, if it’s not covering costs and locking in margins and it’s not picking tops, what does it do? I hate to say it, but its focus is on protecting the CWB itself.

Not my idea of a business partner.

[silverback]

He finally said it.

The single most ignorant and selfish thing that these eastern cwb lovers are subjecting the rest of us to.

"...some years we have 11 different crops on our farm and I am in favor of the cwb marketing our durum for us..."

Care to guess what options we have Jag? Probably not, I know that.

Try 4.

Because of guys like you who live in a place where it is a luxury to grow anything you want but can't be bothered to worry about #11, you will drink the cwb Kool-Aid and damn the rest of us just for s$%ts and giggles.

Oh, I know it's coming, the old "don't grow cwb grains then" taunt.

Well if you eastern guys are the ones who can't be bothered with #11, then maybe it is you who shall stop growing them.

And one last question which you guys will never answer, why are you not working harder to get crops #1 - 10 under cwb control if you are so convinced it is the best marketer in the whole world?

[Fransisco]

The pork boards all survived.

The Ontario wheat board survived.

Air Canada survived.

The telephone companies all survived.

How is it that companies like Toepfer can function in Canada without any assets? How is it that Cargill managed to do it for 50 years?

I'm sorry but the voluntary won't work, we don't have any assets arguments don't hold a lot of water.

[Jagfarms]

Silverback

A lot of farmers in our area only grow Durum and I
think they might be further ahead most years than
we are growing 11 different crops if we were to sit
down and figure out the ten year average. There is
some farmers I know that they grow durum year
after year and they have no complaints about the
CWB. Some of them are deferring grain checks year
after year and the their farms are getting bigger
year after year only growing CWB crops. Must be
working ok for them and all they have is praise for
the CWB.

I

[Fransisco]

Silverback, I think you got everything right except that I think Jag's from somewhere in Western Saskatchewan.

[food4u]

Yes he is northwest of Swift Current near the Alberta border.