Episode Transcript
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Hey there, folks. Welcome to episode seven of the what the Futures podcast. I hope you're having a great day wherever you're tuning in from. It's been a bit of a week here for myself. I'm recording Thursday evening, which is much later than usual. I've got my wonderful glass of Gibson's to help me get through today's recording. It is just wonderful. After a very busy week, of course, is brought to you by John Deere there's a whole new John Deere lineup. I'm sure you saw it on x this week down at commodity Classic, but a whole new John Deere lineup, that's out right now. New tractors, new combines, there's a new air car, too, all with built in intelligence that keeps getting smarter. Check them out. John Deere, CA what a week by the folks over at John Deere. I was actually supposed to attend commodity classic.
Well, it was on the bucket list number one and it was on the calendar as well. But my travels took me a little bit far and wide here and just couldn't swing all the travel. So commodity classic, I'm coming for you in 2025. Write it down. I'm going to be there. All right. A little bit of a shorter episode for you guys today, I think after the week we've had here.
We put two episodes out last Friday, the one with Christy, with Rebellion Farms. We talked about the slow paying grain company and they sent me an email and I'm going to just talk about that here in a sec. But we had that. We had our usual episode. And then of course, on Monday, put out the spotlight special with Ray Bouchard of AgI three. You can check them out at AGI three AI, that is the risk management platform.
Yield based crop insurance is one of the offerings over there. And to be honest, folks in the private crop insurance world, it is hectic right now.
I'm not saying this as a sales pitch, but for eating our veggies.
One of my things for this week is reviewing your risk management strategies, and that may include some of your insurance programs. I know those tuning in from Alberta, you haven't seen your AFSC documents, you won't see them for a while yet.
But Manitoba's had theirs for quite some time here over a month now, and Saskatchewan's got their what if scenarios. If you log into the platform and from a private insurance side, it is full out, hair back 100 miles an hour.
And they're busy, folks. They're busy. And if you haven't already, again, if you're looking for risk management strategies in 2024. I strongly encourage you to check out Agi three AI. Send them a note, someone from the team, full disclosure. That's where I work during the day, where I'm hanging my hat.
There's a lot there to look at, a lot of things to check out, and I strongly encourage you to do so here at this time. Today's episode, I've got Dustin Dinwiddy joining me from UPL as well. I'm super excited about UPL and getting partnered with those folks here over the next couple months, so there'll be a lot more to come. But Dustin's going to kick us off here with a short interview. In today's episode, we've got a mailbag, which just absolutely blew up the mailbag.
It felt like I was getting letters from kids at Christmas, almost like the mailbox went from absolutely dead.
I put my mom on the show last week. Her podcast debut, Marlin, travel agent Extraordinaire. And then, like, I don't know, whatever she said just sparked with you guys or what, but the mailbox just blew open.
And it was questions, like, all over the map. A lot of them were about financials and the high cost of production.
And I brought in Daryl with Connectsis credit union to talk about that. But unfortunately, my Internet connection was kind of giving out throughout that recording, so we're going to have to give it another go.
And I threw some doozies at him because you threw them at me, folks. And like I told you, I'll bring in the experts to talk about them. So Daryl might have to do either a special episode next week or we'll fit him in to next week's episode. But I'll just say, folks, step one, very first step, sit down and figure out your cost of production.
I'm getting questions about how do I save money? Where do I cut cost? And I completely understand that, but I just strongly encourage you to make sure that you know your numbers, number one, and then work from that. Because if you know your numbers, then you can have a discussion with your accountant or with your financial advisor or lender about what stands out, what stands out as being high or higher. I don't have access to that information. Your accountant will and your financial advisors will as well, and they can help guide you on what looks high, what looks low, things to consider for saving money. And Daryl and I had a great chat. I wish I could get it on this episode. He's got some great tips in there. So I'll make a point of re recording here and getting that on next week's show.
Before we get to some hot topics here and some crop price updates. Again, folks, going to keep this one to about half an hour here, maybe a bit less even. I think we've gone an hour on some of these episodes lately and certainly like to shorten it up just a little bit at times. And with the week I've had here, the busyness, it's a good episode to do that.
So of course, folks, I appreciate all the emails. I haven't had a chance to respond to all of them yet. I appreciate the comments on YouTube or on our social media feeds.
They're all fantastic and I really appreciate the interaction. Again, folks, you have an opportunity to drive the show here just a little bit and asking those questions certainly can do that with the podcast. Well, a couple of things, of course, follow us on all social media channels. Next week I'll launch kind of our March initiative when it comes to getting your name entered to potentially win a trip for two to Nashville, Tennessee. It's basically going to involve you reaching out to friends and neighbors and having them tune into the podcast. So stay tuned for that. But Tuesday I'm actually going to be down at the crop management network conference. So a crop input retailer with, I don't know if there's any locations in Saskatchewan. Actually, it might be all Alberta, but this meeting is in Cameros, Alberta. It's a great conference. I know Sean Haney with real AG is one of the speakers. I think they have three speakers, main speakers. There's also a bit of a trade show there. I'll be hanging out there at the egg I three booth. But if you are in the cameras region on Tuesday, I think it goes from like ten to four or ten to five. They're going to give you a good meal. There's going to be some great people there. And of course I'll be there as well. So you can come say hi to me, but you can go and email them. It's RSVP at CMN AG. So that's RSVP at CMN. So Cropmanagementnetwork AG and I know they had a few spots left, so come hang out with those folks for the day. We had James Mitchell on an episode a couple of weeks ago and I'm going to have to get him back on.
He's going to be busy that day, but I'm going to try to corner him with my mini microphone. I don't have it here, but I've got these little miniature microphones and I'm going to try to corner him because the fertilizer market's making another move higher after urea kind of relaxed here the last month or so.
It took a jump this week and Foss took a pretty big jump and the situation is looking a little bit fragile when it comes to getting Foss on farm in time.
Honestly, folks, if you haven't booked your foss yet and you planned on using it here for the spring of 24, get after it. I know we talked about it a lot already, but I would not hesitate anymore. I would certainly get my ducks in a row on that. And I was chatting with a grower here earlier today and they got a text from their retail like a week ago or something like that. A couple of weeks ago now maybe. And the retail said, hey, we view this as the last time to basically buy before prices climb and expect prices to hold firm and climb into spring, which is pretty normal and not expected decline until that late June July inventory. I don't know if you call it a write off, not a write off scenario, but quite often we get those better opportunities to buy fert in that time. So, folks, again, I'm not an expert in this, the information is there for you to think about and potentially use.
But yeah, get after it on the fert side. But come hang out crop management network event on Tuesday. I'll be at the ag I three booth.
All right, hot topic for this week. Well, if you tuned into the episode with Christy, and again, I want to thank Christy for joining in. And so in that episode, we talked about eggfinity and Christie's scenario of slow payment and changing terms. Okay. And I did get a message from a grower after the episode voicing some frustration as well. But I also got an email here, I'll see if I can find it. But I got an email from eggfinity. And what I want to say here, I won't really read it word for word, but I do view this as a sincere email that I received from them. Number one, they did take the opportunity to email the show and provide some additional context and they are talking about their situation that has been frustrating and they are working diligently through these scenarios and working to catch up and nearing a resolution on these outstanding issues. And so kind of the main gentleman there, his name is Joseph, and part of the email here know they were saying, if you're one of these growers and you're facing some of these challenges, just to reach out to them and have a conversation and they'll help you get a plan in place, or they'll help provide some additional clarity. And so they are operating there as business as not usual, but they are writing new contracts and stuff like that that's continuing. But they are working to regain and work on their reputation and the trust from growers.
When I look at this to reach out to me, they certainly didn't have to do that. But to reach out and to word this email and spend the time to proactively communicate is a good sign.
And I just encourage you, if you've done business with agfinity and you have questions, to reach out to those folks and have that discussion with.
I, again, I chat with farms all the time here, and we're chatting through a few different scenarios. It's not great across the prairies when it comes to financial situations. I even heard a pretty famous US crop marketing advisor guy, he said, in the US, if you haven't sold your corn and your beans yet, you're taking in a loss here from the 2023 crop. So whatever you grew in 23, if you haven't sold it yet, you're selling at a loss today. And so you can look at the folks involved in the industry, you can look at farms. We know it's tough slugging out there. We hope there's resources, assets, cash to use yet, but margins are not great in 2024. 2025 looks to be potentially a little bit worse, and 2026 could be extremely difficult. But also, it resonates on the other side, too. If it's an equipment dealer or a retail or grain buyer, no one is necessarily isolated completely from it. So I just noticed there's a few other grain companies or end users where things have slowed down a little bit. And I think if you're listening to this, my message is just to make sure that you're having those conversations with your buyers and the companies you're communicating with. Know your terms and conditions, know when to expect payment, check to see if they're bonded, make sure you're comfortable with everything. And I don't want to pick on any new startups out there that are just saying, hey, today's day one, we're a fresh company buying grain across the prairies. But you got to be cautious right now, because economically, it's tough going out there for a lot of folks, and we want to see everybody succeed. So for eggfinity, again, I think this is a positive step forward.
And hopefully that translates to growers that are owed money and they get a plan in place and get paid up in a timely fashion.
Normally, folks, when these scenarios have presented themselves in the past, nobody answers the phone or responds to an email or opens the door when you go knocking. And they did send an email, they are answering their phones and yeah, I just wanted to put that out there as well. All right.
Okay. My other hot topic for this week is just going to, again, to risk management.
Again, I'm not saying this stuff so that you guys think that our farm knows what the heck we're doing because we have plenty of challenges like everybody else, right? But it's the easiest thing for me to reference back to. And when I make mistakes, and we make mistakes, you're probably going to hear about them more often than not. Hopefully we can help other people learn from them.
But for this week, and this is eating your veggies as well. But we've been hunkered down reviewing our options when it comes to crop insurance. So we farm in Saskatchewan. We got our Saskatchewan package. Pleasantly surprised by the price of canola north of $15.
So pretty happy with that. We got a little yield boost as well. Our 22 yields came in. So that's good. The premium is up, but the overall package, it is what it is, but kind of pleasantly surprised. But we still fall short in a few areas on covering our cost of production. And so canola is fine, but barley, our yield index. We're fairly new barley growers, so yield is a little bit lower than what we would like to see. So we're a little shy there. We're a little bit shy on our wheat. I think lots of farms are across the prairies and our coverage on peas is a little bit shy as well.
It's closer, but still a little bit shy there for us. We've been looking at all sorts of scenarios.
Again, folks, it may not seem hectic out there from a crop insurance side, but it is gangbusters when you look at private insurance products. These are businesses that the way the industry works is they have limited capacity.
It's just the way it works.
Everyone wishes they had maximum capacity, but as they get going, it is limited capacity. And there are going to be people on the outside looking in and saying, shoot, why didn't I get behind it? And I know you guys are going to listen and say, he works for those guys. That's why he's saying all this. Honestly, folks, you can have a conversation with anybody at the Ag I three office. You're not going to get a pushy salesperson at all. I just want you from a podcast perspective and a farming perspective if you want to seek out additional risk management strategies with crop insurance, you have to get after it now. Otherwise you will be on the outside looking in. All right, so it's been a busy week and I hope that translates okay for those tuning in.
Yeah. All right. I don't have any egg headlines for this week.
I know you guys get those elsewhere. But anyways, I'm going to jump to just a couple of crop price updates.
Number one, yellow peas. Are you guys seeing what I'm seeing? A little bit of $11 delivered. 1050 picked up on Farm with act of God. That's out there as well. That's new crop yellow peas, folks. You know what to do with that one. Secure the bag, get after it. Get a little bit priced in there. If you're a yellow pea grower, let's say you grow like peas and you're growing maybe some feed barley, wheat, canola, and you didn't get any wheat or canola done.
This is your chance to do a little bit of crop marketing to help boost your confidence level a little bit. Just get a little bit of something sold just to remember how it feels to forward sell and to get going on this. You're insured. Saskatchewan, you're insured at, geez, what was it, nine in a bit. Alberta is high. Eight, you can go and secure some decent margin opportunity on yellow peas. So go and make that phone call and start to build up your confidence again because you are going to sell canola here one day. And I'm going to talk about futures in a second from there. Maple peas. New crop maple peas hit $18. Picked up on farm with act of God. So that's a little uptick there as well on those maples. And I wanted to mention Ray Glenn. They put out a great weekly little market commentary. You guys could check it out as well. It's just right on the website. But they also talked about barley. 1 million ton carryover up 35% year over year. And I know that barley looks good from a crop insurance perspective, but where corn kind of travels, barley will travel for price. And there's quite a bit of supply around. Just something to keep in mind for your crop planning for 2024.
I just can't get too bold up on barley here at this time. Now, I do have some positive news if we just switch to futures for a second.
I don't know all the technical jargon and all the fancy words and all the big phrases to say, but I know that the smart people were excited about the corn market and a potential turnaround in corn futures this week and what I'm excited about. And here's where I was wrong, folks. I got to put my hand up. I was wrong. Maybe take a sip.
I thought canola by March 15 would hit 515. Five one five. And what I've seen out of the canola market is that futures are going well. We're trading fairly sideways now, and we're challenging the 20 day moving average.
But we were going down, so we were dropping, how do I say it? Not as fast, right? Not as severe. So we started to slow down on the sell off.
And full disclosure, I own canola puts. And for my plan, I'll be exiting those here in probably the next week, getting out of those puts. So I want to tell you guys, oh, shoot. I didn't do my positive moments yet.
Maybe this canola market is turning around here just a little bit.
I'm not going to get overly bullish. Like, I'm not saying canola is going from $13 to $16, but the future side of this market.
Hey, in next week's episode, I might be talking about a little bit of a rally. The rally cry might be on here a little bit like, we'll see. But I'm starting to feel a little bit good. I'm actually going to take.
I'm a little bit nervous about my canola put. So take that for what it's worth. I could be completely wrong, but I was wrong about the 515. It's not, knock on wood. Doesn't seem to want to go there. Maybe it's 550 or 560 is a support line. But here we go, folks. We might be catching our bounce. All right.
Okay.
What else I have for prices? Eating our veggies. So again, review your risk management and private insurance plan. That's number one. Number two, sell some yellow peas. Just talked about that. And number three, in portions of the prairies. I hate that these words are going to come out of my mouth, but I'm not bullish. Canola basis.
Like, not a whole bunch. Like, there's a bit of export demand to China. That's great. Crushers are going to fill in that may position and pay a bit for that. That's great. But I just wonder if we need to grab some of that basis and you got to be disciplined. Oh, you got to be disciplined, folks. On the future side, don't just do it and throw a Hail Mary and say, I'm not pricing this till July. The market's going to scream, don't do that.
But maybe consider if there's a basis premium in your area, in your backyard.
Shoot, I hate saying this, but maybe you got to lock that up. All right. I might edit it out the episode yet, but that's what I'll say for now.
Okay, folks, what we'll do.
I'm going to bring in Dustin Dinwiddy with UPL. He's going to share a little bit of what they got going on over there, then I'm going to come back. We are going to draw for a bag of canola seed from pioneer seeds. Pick our winner. So many questions came in for the mailbag. And then I'll end the episode with my positive moments of the week. Okay, so a little bit backwards here for episode 17, here's Dustin. All right, folks, I have Dustin dinwiddy with UPL joining me on this wonderful day. Dustin, how's your day going?
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it's going pretty good. Ryan, thanks for allowing us on the show.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: You bet.
So I know you're broadcasting.
What part of Saskatchewan are you in?
[00:26:13] Speaker B: We live just south of the booming metropolis of Lemberg, Saskatchewan, which is, I would say, probably 30 miles east of indian head. If that puts it on a little bit more on the map for people.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: Getting a little bigger there. You bet. Good stuff. Do you guys get the snow here the last couple of days?
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Yeah, wonderfully. It's blizzarding outside right now, which is very welcome. Nice to have some old stuff on the ground.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: I call it the shop, but it's the second garage. Right. And I got my boots on right now. I got my winter boots on, and it was up to my knees making my trek across here. So the commute into the studio was a little treacherous today.
All right, so, Dustin, I got a funny story to kick us off. I think it's a funny story.
Back in the day, I used to do grain marketing. All right. I used to do a little bit of consulting. And your family, you guys are heavily into agriculture, and I believe your dad works at the John Deere dealership in Vegarville, correct?
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Well, he used to. He's actually century, but just a couple of years ago, retired.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: Okay. All right, so this is back in 2015. All right, so I'm starting off on my own, and I made these little posters. All right. I don't know, whatever. Staples. I got this poster. I'm a grain marketing person, and I'm trying to tack these things up all overeast Alberta. Okay. Like, walk into the dealership and most places looked at me and just looked at the door, and we're like, get out of here. Okay.
But I walk into the dealership, and the coffee machine has the board behind it.
Your dad says, yeah, no problem, put a sign up, but come see me in my office after. I'm like, okay. Put my sign up and walk into his office, and he's like, okay, what's your farm kid from Saskatchewan doing? Grain marketing. Blah, blah, blah. He's like, okay, cool. He's like, well, if that doesn't work out, why don't you come work for me?
It's like off the cuff job proposal at the deer dealership. So that's my story of your dad.
I thought that was pretty.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I believe it.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: Yeah, the grain market thing kind of worked out for me, so I never went back to take him up on that job, but, yeah.
All right, man. So we've known each other for a little bit as well.
Give us just a little bit of your intro, your background, what you're all about.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So, thank you.
Yeah, that's probably a quite telling story about my family, but, yeah, born and raised in Vegaville, and that's obviously where we crossed paths. Right.
I was just leaving Cargill from a sales job, and you're, I think, just kind of coming into a grain marketing side, so crossed over with a lot of customers and have really appreciated your insight over the years. So from there, went to work for a company called Arista as a sales rep, and met my wife, who is actually from Saskatchewan, from Lemberg, and we got married and decided to move to Saskatchewan. So we've been here for.
I guess we've been here for nine years already. Holy moly.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So have worked for Arista for a long time.
Became UPL in 2018, I think.
So. Really? The same people in Canada, the same products in Canada, a few more products, but change names, and UPL isn't a very well known name within canadian market, for sure.
I think if you'd ask anybody, probably very few of them would know who UPL is. But surprisingly, something that we learned going from little Arista to UPL is that UPL is actually the fifth largest chem company in the world. So not a huge presence in Canada, but big in the global side of things.
A little bit more about us.
My wife farms with her brother and her dad, and I farm a little bit, too, but that's what she does every day. We farm about 6500 acres of grainland. And, yeah, we have three little kids. We have an eight year old, six year old, and a four year old.
Nice. Yeah, we're always running around something. So, yeah, things are good.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: Perfect. That's great.
I think of Arista. I think of Arista. I think of a product like Everest. I think maybe my backyard was a pretty big area for Everest back in the day. That's how I would think of it anyway.
Where did UPL come from? Where's UPL's roots?
[00:31:18] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So UPL is an indian based and owned chemistry company, and they bought Arista for a couple of reasons, but one of them was for their suite of chemistry around the world, but the other one was actually for their biological side of the business, too, that they start to really heavily invest in. So you'll start to see more of that come out of UPL from a canadian standpoint in the next few.
One, we have two out, we have wave, which is a biosimulant. And really, it's for stress of things. Like, it works really well within canola and peas. So if you think of stress, usually we'd spray those kind of products before the stress would come. So think of drought stress. Right. Or think of whatever kind of stress you can throw at the crop.
Wave helps mitigate that. And it's derived from natural seeding extracts, actually. And I'm not smart enough to get into all of what's going on in there, but we are quite excited, and it's showing really well in trial data and starting to gain a bit of traction in the market. But you're right. I mean, Arista was known for, really, the Everest company. Right? People called it the Everest company for years because that was the big chemistry that we sold. So you'd know UPL now by Everest, still Rankona trio, which is a pretty popular sea treatment that we have. We've been working really hard at gaining share there. And then more recently, one of the things that actually came over from the UPL side when they bought Arista was interline. So glufosnate. And so that's become a big molecule for us. And obviously a pretty well known brand name over the past few years with the. Yeah, yeah.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Once you say that, they all ring a bell for.
Yeah, I would struggle to associate them with UPL, but they all ring a bell for me for sure, especially innerline and racona. Awesome.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Okay, so we got a little bit of what you guys have here in your suite of products.
Anything new on the horizon that you guys are excited about here for 2024?
[00:33:44] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So there's a few.
I'll talk about a couple of them, maybe quickly, but one I really want to hone in on, which is battalion, and I'll maybe come back to that, but we're changing how we're going to do Clethrum a little bit. So it used to be that Clethrum was so select or centurion also, it's known by, would be like a two jugs in a box. And so we've switched to a one jug solution or a one drum solution. So we're quite excited about that. We're calling it select one.
We're also adding, though, another product to that kind of, that mainstay of products, and it's going to be called select plus. And so it's going to actually have clethidum in it, which is what we're talking about for wild control, but it's also going to have quasalafop in it, and that's really good for things like foxtail barley, for example, would be a really good strong spot there. Wave already talked about a little bit. We're putting a lot of focus on that. And then, obviously battalion, too, which I would like to talk a little bit more about, if we can, today. But sure, it's really exciting to us. Yeah, those would be the big three that we're really focused on as we move into the 2024 growing year.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: So what's getting you excited about battalion? What's that one all about?
[00:35:01] Speaker B: Yeah, so battalion, we got registered right before Christmas, so it's been a long time coming. We've been quite excited about this one for a few years, and basically, it's going to do a lot of things, but it's got four active ingredients in one jug. And so it's a broad spectrum product for wheat, really, in the black soil zone, in the dark brown is really where it's going to fit.
But what we're excited about is it's going to bring a lot of ease of use and a lot of time savings to the grower. So it's got four active ingredients. It's got fucarbizone, which obviously is Everest. It's got fluoroxapir, which is a group four. MCA, which is a group four. And got. It's got three modes of action and it's got two spectrums of control. So it'll control your wild oats and your grass weeds, but it's also going to control your broadleaf weeds. And it's all in one jug, which is really nice. I mean, lots of times.
We've sold Everest for a number of years and it's worked well, but the grower always has to add more jugs and make a tank mix, and sometimes the trailer is pretty full with that. Right.
This is a lot simpler and a lot easier and really a lot quicker, which is going to be, I think, a game changer for us.
We actually brought battalion to market in 2019, and we were really excited about it and we had some formulation troubles trying to jam so many things into that jug.
We had some problems with it coming out of the jug, and I think some of the people that used to grain market for, I know were some of the people who had trouble with it. Okay.
But we're really excited about bringing it back, and it took a few years to get that right and to get the chemistry figured out properly, but it will not fail now. And I can say that with 100% assurance because I've frozen it and thought it and poured it out myself to make sure that it's not going to give us trouble. So we're quite excited about battalion. I think it's going to have a huge spot on a spray trailer.
It's going to bring the flushing control of Everest and then also really a lot of nice stuff on the broadleaf side. So it'll be good.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: Yeah, you bet.
I think my brother, usually at spray season, has a couple of big markers and recipes all written out on boxes everywhere and making sure that the sprayer operators got the right recipe going on and all that. So this sounds like it might be just a little bit easier at times if it's all in one jug, so. Sounds good.
[00:37:47] Speaker B: Yeah, no, big time.
[00:37:49] Speaker A: All right, dustin, I appreciate you joining me today. Anything else that you want to touch on at Upl? You guys got anything coming up? Any deadlines, events, anything like that?
[00:38:00] Speaker B: I think there's just a couple of things.
We were at all the big farm shows over the last couple of months.
We're going to try to do some smaller grower things, maybe a little bit more dynamic and in place over the next couple of months. So kind of stay tuned for that. If anybody has any questions, I would say feel free to drop any of us a line. I think probably the easiest way to do that would be to go to the website, to our website, which is upltd Comca, and from there you can find your rep locator or look at any of the text sheets or anything that we talked about.
Yeah, I think that that's probably all I'd want to say. And just really appreciate the time today and really appreciate your show, Ryan, so thank you for that.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: You bet. Well, I appreciate you coming on and connecting, and I'm sure we'll hear a lot more from UPL here as 2024 moves on. So, yeah, enjoy the snow out there and we'll be in touch soon.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: Yeah, sounds good, man. Thanks.
[00:39:10] Speaker A: All right, thanks, Dustin, for joining the show. I'm super excited UPL we're just working through some details, but they're stepping up to join the show here. So I'm super pumped to have them on board here. Moving forward, we got lots of exciting things coming up. All right, I'm going to spin the wheel of winning here while I record.
I don't think you guys can hear this, but anyway, there it goes.
So lots of questions came in the mailbag, which is sponsored by Pioneer Seeds, the great agency of Power farm Seeds. Since November, we had Matt was our winner at the podcast launch party. Brad was our winner in December. In January it was Christopher.
And now we got a February winner here as Robert Geis geese. Guys from Barhead, Alberta, he was wondering what the outlook was on Faba beans. And I promise, folks, I'm going to answer more mailbag questions in short order. But he was asking about the Faba bean market.
Now, Robert, I appreciate the question in regards to fabba beans, and fabba beans are a crop that I have struggled to market in my career, which is not what you want to hear for an answer right off the bat, but there was a really strong success story. Faba beans were a strong success story here in portions of the prairies in 2023. And I saw some phenomenal returns where folks got a tremendous yield and a tremendous price, and it just turned out really well for fabba beans for some of these farms. Now, it's a smaller acre crop, prairie wide. We're talking about 100,000 acres, not quite half and half in Alberta and Saskatchewan. You've got an export market, which has been kind of my frustration. The export market, not that it comes and goes, per se, but if you have harvest the right quality at the right time, it can turn out well. But it's a bit of a niche crop. Demand isn't always available and it can be a little bit frustrating to deal with at times. Now, if it's going into the feed market, it's a little bit more consistent, but you're going to see a substantial discount over that export market. And so what I would say is that all commodities, generally speaking, the trend here for everything into 2025 is lower than where we're at today.
So if Robert, if someone's offering you a price like you're insured in Alberta. I think it's. Jeepers. Was it $9 a bushel? I think it was $9 a bushel for Fabbas. If someone's going to come at you with like a twelve or a 13 or a 14 to get started with that tight supply from last year, then you're going to want to take a hard look at that with act of God and get some pretty heavy contracting done. Because even though some crops can stand out on their own from a margin perspective and can hold their own, the trend for commodities is lower. And it wouldn't surprise me to see a little rebound in acreage and with that, just a little bit lower price trend as well. And I think that whatever you get offered today, and I tried to get some quotes from buyers for Faba beans, I had no success here as of February 29, no success yet on bids.
But it wouldn't surprise me if that's your best contract of the year when it comes to those FABAs. Okay. Lots of things can happen on a small acre crop like fabba beans.
I know that you're looking for more direction than that, but that's about all I can say on it here at this time.
So Robert is our winner of our pioneer canola seed for the month of February. So congratulations, Robert. I'm going to send you an email here in a few minutes and get you teed up with the folks at Tower Farms again, folks, if you entered a question, you are entered to win a bag of canola seed. You are also still entered to win, potentially win, a trip for two to Nashville, Tennessee. What? The Futures podcast sending you to Nashville. So keep sending them in. I'm going to do my best to get them answered. I'm going to try to answer more. At some point next week, I might do like a live episode and answer them or maybe something on X or I don't know what, but I got to get more of these questions answered. And Darryl with Connectus is going to join me as well, and he's going to join me and answer some of the financial ones again, Internet connection was our struggle. All right, positive moments of the week ending the show backwards. My wife and I, positive moment. The only one, I think, for this week we went on. So we have two kids, right? We have Willow, who's three, and we have Finn, who is just over a year old. And we went on our first date since Finn was born. Our first date where we left the kids with the babysitter. Okay. Abigail is the name of our babysitter we had left them with family before on one occasion, and we went out to dinner, but we were facetiming our daughter pretty much half the time. It didn't go that well.
Anyway, this time we went to a movie. This was the first movie I've seen in theater since Top Gun. So whenever that came out, not the old Top gun, but the new one.
So I think it's been a while, right, since my last movie. And we had a great afternoon and a nice little dinner. And the kids did phenomenal. They did phenomenal. They love the babysitter.
Can't wait for the next one. And the kids were pumped. So we got to go on our first adult date with the kids under the watchful eye of the babysitter. So that was fantastic. That's my positive moment for the week.
Okay, folks, that's it for episode 17. I know it's a bit of a mishmash here for this one, but thanks for tuning in. I appreciate all your listens and your ears. And for now, I'm out.
We. When I'm.
