Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] This week, markets tank well, at least a time. At the time of recording here on Wednesday, April 8, there's a ceasefire mean absolutely anything for crop prices. Moving forward, we're going to update crop rankings. I finally did it. Increase the fertilizer budget. I'll dive into that. We'll talk strategy and also we'll talk about my meeting agendas. All right, folks, episode 117 coming at you right now.
[00:00:28] Hey, folks, welcome to the what the Futures podcast, your quick guide to better farming decisions.
[00:00:42] All right, folks, welcome into episode 117 of the what the Futures podcast, recorded each and every week in the UPL studio. UPL is launching a new fungicide for this summer, Tellaron. You're going to be familiar with that one, folks, by the time we get to harvest time. Telluron is a fungicide that works on sclerantinia. All right, Sclerentinia protection in your canola. It also is a product that works on fusarium head blight in cereals.
[00:01:10] It works on a pile of different crops, folks, it is. Reach out to your local retail and get those details on Telluron, that new fungicide from upl. Now, if you want to stay up to date all things what the futures, go and hit that subscribe button on the YouTube channel. Certainly appreciate that. We're north of 1300 subscribers now, so I really thank you for the love out there. I'm going to try not to keep you too long. I want to talk about war stuff. I want to talk about market reaction. And even if it really matters, to be honest with you, it really doesn't for this week, this down day, like not to sit here and say that I'm a bull and I think these markets are going higher. I just think these markets were showing signs of cracking prior to the ceasefire. So we'll talk about some more stuff. I want to just do a little bit of pre war and today, where markets are at and what you can look at there. I want to talk about if it didn't feel good to see the market drop, what you could do. I want to talk basically my agenda when I sit down with a farmer. I'm a big believer in agendas. I've brought an agenda to every single meeting I've had going back to what's gotta be a decade.
[00:02:22] And if I didn't bring the agenda, then something weird happened that week. It would be very, very rare. But you think about it, you're taking time to sit down with a business. You know, from my perspective, you're sitting down with a Business, you're taking, you know, a few hours of their day, their week to review, you know, their crop marketing plan, kind of setting the stage.
[00:02:44] And so I find it's very important to have that mutual respect of both organizations to say, hey, I'm coming here. This is everything that I want to talk about and why. And then also, what would you like to talk about? Let's put that on the agenda here as well. So I'm going to dive into that. That's going to be the bulk of today's episode because frankly, guys, we've set you up for what's happened this week.
[00:03:12] Like, if you, if you want to talk strategy or you want to talk about what to do, then go and listen to some past episodes. In fact, even go check out my conversation with Trent Clarenback here earlier this week. On Tuesday, Tuesday morning, bright and early, we didn't know what was going to happen from a ceasefire perspective. But you know, Trent's talking about some of these, you know, some of the way the charts are looking and some of the downside potential. But if you want a technical outlook, just go check out cup of coffee from, from Tuesday.
[00:03:42] And yeah, we've kind of talked about strategy, how to protect yourself in this market, how the sideways trend that was happening was not great, you know, not, not fun and exciting. The blow off top man, someone's gonna have to throw it in, in, in chat GPT or something. How many times did Ryan mention blow off top here the last couple weeks? Because we certainly, we've talked about a lot of this stuff, talked about what to do in this environment.
[00:04:12] And, and I did, you know, I said, you know, when the bad days happen, when, when you have the big down day, that's not the day to act.
[00:04:23] That's not the day that you want to be sitting there saying, oh man, I got to get my stuff figured out. I got to do something. I got to learn a strategy today.
[00:04:32] No, no, no, no, not that day.
[00:04:35] You do that before, all right? And hopefully you get a chance to do it after as well, but not on that day. You know, I got asked this week, you know, how busy is your phone?
[00:04:45] You know, when this market, you know, tanks on Wednesday, how busy is your phone? And actually eight text messages and some of that's just grain prices, stuff that came out even more depressing on my phone. Oh, man, I'm not even going to turn it around. I got, I got one phone call today.
[00:05:05] I got one phone call. I work with 70 farms in the lunchbox crew and I got one phone call today and less than 10 text messages. So anyways, these are the quieter days, right? So you do the hard work before you prep before. And when the market changes, you know, if you think it's changing, then you start to execute. At that point, you don't do it on the big, big, big down day. All right, I want to talk here. Let's just do some positive moments and then come back to where did the markets, where were they when the war started and where are they at today? Positive moments for this week.
[00:05:39] So our five, well, five year old going on 15, Wilhelmina. We had a visit from the tooth fairy at our house this week.
[00:05:50] And I forgot about the excitement of the tooth fairy. Like Willa, she's, a couple weeks ago, she's like, my tooth feels like it's loose or it's, I can wiggle it. I'm like, oh, wow, cool. Okay, yeah, right, right. Kids lose their baby teeth. You just don't think about that. And so we were, we spent the weekend at the water slide, Easter weekend, water slide, pool, having lots of fun. And this tooth was, you know, it was, it was a topic. We were watching this thing, right? It was getting loose and wiggling more and more. So we were very on, on it. And then finally, Easter Monday rolls around Tuesday of this week, tooth pops out and.
[00:06:42] Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was this morning. So Tuesday night, tooth fairy camera came to visit. Now I forgot how exciting it was. We got Easter bunny and tooth fairy kind of back to back.
[00:06:52] And it was very important for my wife that the tooth fairy brought, brought coins, brought loonies and toonies. It was very, very important to her. I don't know what childhood memory, if that was a core memory for her or not, but it was very, very important because I was like, hun, my buddy's telling me the tooth Fairy brings like 20 bucks now. And she's like, no, no, not this one. This tooth fairy's bringing loonies and loonies and toonies. So anyways, it was great. Tooth fairy wrote a little note. And of course, I think the best part was that before bed, before putting her tooth under her pillow, she went and grabbed her toothbrush, she shined that sucker right up. That tooth was the shiniest little tooth. So the tooth fairy was quite happy to receive that. So that was fun this week. Okay, now going back to markets here, guys. So February 28th is when all, all hell breaks loose here for in the Middle east and in Iran.
[00:07:45] And so I just want to run through where prices were Trading at kind of where they're at now. And just to give a little perspective on.
[00:07:54] Yeah. On what we're still, I guess, gaining overall, I'm going to spin this into crop rankings because they're kind of connected, but in a depressing way.
[00:08:07] My crop rankings barely, have barely moved. All right. And I'll explain why in a sec.
[00:08:12] So July Canola, when this all started trading at 698. Today is trading at 7:20. And I'm just going to put the high at 7:50. 30 bucks a ton from the high 20. 2 bucks a ton higher than. Than where. Where we were out when this all started. And don't forget, Canola was rallying way before this. It was. It was on its way. Right. It was doing some great things before this happened. So we're kind of right in the middle, right in the middle of the action here, just slightly below that. But, you know, as we're, you know, as we finish recording tonight, maybe we get a little positive bump here, a little gain. Canola currently up buck 90, something like that tonight.
[00:09:00] Spring wheat, when this all starts 627, I'll put my high here at 670 on the July contract. That's a bit better than that, but currently trading at 640. So we've haven't given up all the gains, but most of the gains here from, you know, from the peak in March when in the thick of the war in the Middle East, Kansas City wheat, 593, when the war started, currently 612 got a high of 660. So, you know, unrelated, I would assume, is, you know, the improved rain events in Oklahoma and Texas and. And the strong winter wheat crop in Russia. I know it's early, but there's been some things that have caused some damage to that, to that market as well. Oh, it's for 326. Currently 337. I've got the high at 372. If anyone should be a little bit fired up right now, it's the oat guys, right? The oat growers out there because, darn it, the price changed by like a nickel across the prairies for old crop and new crop. So they did not show that full gain.
[00:10:09] And they have every right to be the most frustrated. Now here's where it gets interesting. My last two soybeans, 1183, is where we're trading at today.
[00:10:18] We hit a high. Pardon me, 1183 soybeans, 1183, when the war started today, trading 1178 and a high of 1250 oats. We didn't see the gains for, for growers in the bids. Soybeans, we saw all that erased. All of that erased. And soybeans held on today. Soybeans actually didn't drop. This happened prior to the ceasefire. Corn455 currently trading right around there as well. I did I Do this right?
[00:10:52] 448, yeah. And that's on the nearby. So, yeah, 455 out the July. 455. The high of 485 completely erasing the gains that we have seen, both corn and beans. Wheat still holds a slight premium. Canola hanging on the best. It didn't rally as much in the war and it's also hanging on the best here in the decline. All right, so that's where we sit.
[00:11:18] Someone asked me today, well, what do I do now? What do I do, you know, if I don't feel good about what the market, the market dropped this week. Like what, what's your suggestion? The easy suggestion would be to, you know, to price something and then take a smaller amount of risk and re. Own it. Right? If you want to sell the 720 canola and then reown a portion of that risk. If you, if you want to do the easy way.
[00:11:44] The hard way, though, would be putting your faith in the ceasefire agreement. That is going to last. I guess if you don't think it's going to last, you would set your targets at the what I would say like the bottom or bottom side of that range. So if Canola traded at 7, you know, 735, 740 on the July contract is maybe a March type of range. If you look at the chart and you say, yeah, that looks reasonable, kind of the bottom end of that chart.
[00:12:11] You know, if 750 is on the high end, then you set your target there, all right? There's no guarantees, though. That's why the easy one is to sell the 720 and, and then just replace it. A portion of that risk on, on paper.
[00:12:25] Right? Same thing with wheat, same thing with, with most of these crops. All right, Now, I, I'm not a believer, I'm not a believer in the ceasefire, all right? I don't know what, I don't know what the heck's going to happen. I don't know what is going to go on here.
[00:12:40] But you can't, in my opinion, you can't have a ceasefire between Iran and the US and in the meantime, the Israelis are just like bombing the heck out of Lebanon. I don't know. I don't know how that can. How that leads to continued peace or ceasefire over there, but we'll see.
[00:13:01] Way smarter people than myself are, Are involved in that. So I'm. I'm just a spectator on the outside here. We'll see.
[00:13:12] Now, I wanted to change.
[00:13:16] I wanted to spin this into. To crop rankings.
[00:13:20] And then we'll get to my meeting agenda with growers right now and crop rankings.
[00:13:28] So this is the weird part. Okay, the weird part about this is that I went over again, I'm using my. My farm, my geography, my pricing. You know, Dormy, Saskatchewan.
[00:13:44] I'm using that in the example. If you farm further south, you're gonna have different crops in the mix. If you farm in a. In an area, you know, drier area, you'll have different crops in the mix, different fertilizer budgets, all that stuff. But I kept it all kind of relevant to myself, okay?
[00:14:03] And I increased fertilizer by about 40 bucks an acre. My budget was high to start with, but I increased everything by about that number.
[00:14:15] Less on the pulses, obviously.
[00:14:18] Just a slight bump on pulses, just to give a bit more perspective.
[00:14:22] Now, the weird thing about my crop rankings is I did go and make price adjustments, but my price, my largest price adjustment was 3%.
[00:14:36] I increased some cereal prices by 3%.
[00:14:44] Not much, guys. Not much at all. I didn't increase anything higher than 3%.
[00:14:52] These crop rankings were created last fall.
[00:14:56] All right? So you sit there and say, what the heck is going on, man? Like you, you've increased your fertilizer budget in here. I've got seed fert chem insurance, crop insurance. Those are my, what I call my total fixed cost. They give me a gross margin. And then from my gross margin, I'll subtract equipment payments, land payments, fuel, anything that I kind of average over the crops. All right?
[00:15:25] So that's what. What comes out of that number.
[00:15:28] But when I do crop rankings initially, I like an idiot project price.
[00:15:35] You know, I project where I think I can sell all of my wheat. I project where I think I can sell all of my canola and all of my red lentils and all of my yellow peas.
[00:15:48] And so between late October, November, let's say early November to now, I have increased a few crops by the high, the Highest margin of 3%. Nothing.
[00:16:02] Basically nothing. Okay, so what I projected and where I'm at now, not changing it by a whole bunch, I did increase feed barley just a little bit.
[00:16:15] And maybe, oh, naively, I did increase my Durham a little bit. To $8. Again, I'm. We're not a Durham farm. It's for the example. But I did increase that. I kept my spring wheat price the same. I kept my canola price the same. I kept my yellow pea price the same. My oats kept that the same.
[00:16:35] Again, you're trying to figure out, you know, where you feel that you could average on your sales for your farm.
[00:16:43] And I didn't sit here this weekend and think, well, I need to reduce anything by a wide margin. I kept my maple peas at 13 bucks. Might be a little high right now, but I still feel okay about that one. My yellow peas at eight bucks. I'm okay with that. Greens at ten. You know, that's right now a bit of a stretch, but hey, you can judge me, judge this scorecard later on, you know, later on next winter when we, when we see where we're at. I'm still comfortable with that number of 10 bucks. Canola at 15 again, I budgeted 15. 1475. 15, 15, 25 last fall.
[00:17:21] Canola went to 600 before or after I budgeted this. Right. Didn't matter. Right. This is what I'm sticking with for now that hopefully that number's light, but that's what I have in there. Feed barley moved to 550 for our farm. Malt barley moved to 610.
[00:17:38] So we'll see. Wheat. I kept that at 8 bucks. Hard red spring wheat, 13, 5. Protein. Okay, I don't feel a need to change any of these right now.
[00:17:49] You can let me know your crop rankings. Let me know where I'm out to lunch and give me some, some feedback here.
[00:17:56] What's going to pay the bills on our farm this year, even with my higher fertilizer costs, and fortunately we aren't subject to that in 20.
[00:18:05] We are subject to higher fertilizer costs and higher costs like everybody else. But the guys at the farm were a bit more aggressive on their fertilizer purchases and, you know, weren't subject to the latest price increase. But even if we want to put in a price increase here in fertilizer, I still have canola paying the bills with, with extra margin.
[00:18:28] Extra 50 bucks an acre of margin is my number one crop for my farm in Dormy, Saskatchewan, has been the whole time and just got a little easier to achieve with this latest rally. All right.
[00:18:43] It tries to take the canola extra margin, and it's still at $8. Wheat tries to go and top that guy off because it's a loser still on the farm. Right. Now I've got maple peas in my number two spot. I'm still a believer in the maple pea crop in the maple pea market. You know, even I, I do have an offer for 12 bucks. If I lower it to 12 bucks, it still makes all the equipment payments, all the land payments, and, and pays all the bills. So even at 12, it still does it. And 12 is available to me right now.
[00:19:19] Flax is my number three crop. It's in the good by 27 bucks an acre for our farm, even with the higher fertilizer cost.
[00:19:29] And, and again, canola and flax have been there the whole time. Maple peas have been there the whole time for me as well. And nothing's, nothing's really changed here. Where it gets a little bit. Where it gets a little bit, you know, frustrating is now as you start to go and look, you know, my number four crop of malt barley is even with a price bump here today because I don't understand how feed barley and malt barley can be the same price. So I don't know if anyone has a maltster that wants to jump on the show here and sort it out for us. I see that spread. It's not, not as high as it traditionally is, but I still put one in there for today.
[00:20:14] And we're losing about 35 bucks an acre on that one. It's in the number four spot. And then all the cereals, you know, malt barley, feed barley, a feed barley gives us a better chance to go after it. Even with the high FERC cost. It does give us a better chance for us. We need a little bit of help. We. We can't get over, you know, maybe if we get lucky, we get some feed barley over 100 bushels to the acre, but we can't get some of the bigger yields or haven't figured that out yet to make that break even for, for our farm.
[00:20:46] So it gets frustrating because your, your wheats, you know, all kind of come in here and, and you need your canola or we need our canola to offset it. Even our, our pulses. Our green peas or yellow pea scenario, our faba bean scenario, you know, those are all, those are all underwater.
[00:21:07] Underwater. Yellow peas on our farm will be underwater by $115 an acre. Like it's.
[00:21:14] It just is.
[00:21:16] So we have a little bit better chance with green peas. But again, not a fun market to be in right now either.
[00:21:23] You know, I've been doing some market updates or not market updates, but I don't know, some talks in front of some growers. And I basically have said, and you're gonna actually get this presentation when I'm on vacation. I'm pre recording this presentation for you guys to check out. So you'll check that out here in a couple weeks while I'm away.
[00:21:43] It's the first time where we'll ever. That we will have recorded like a presentation style where the slides. I'm going to be like in the little screen on the side and the slides will be popping up as I'm doing the presentation. So I don't know, I think that might be.
[00:21:57] Might be kind of neat. You'll tell me. But I think for 2026, you want to market your.
[00:22:05] You know, I would call them, I shouldn't say low acres, but your specialty crops in one basket of like, call that one like patience.
[00:22:12] You know, maybe some of your lentils, your peas, maybe throw chickpeas, canary seed over there. Like more patience. Just patience on those ones. Anything that was kind of oversupplied this last year, overproduced. That's your patience. You're going to be patient with that one.
[00:22:26] With your wheat, you're going to be like opportunistic. You know, you sit there with wheat and you say, oh man, wheat market sucks. And then for some reason you get a rally and you got to make big bold decisions to typically to get the best price for the year for best average for your farm. So you kind of want to be opportunistic. And then the canola basket, I kind of forgiving. Like last year was a really bad year for us with canola. Now I. I see the canola bulls out there.
[00:22:57] I'm not really with you yet. I believe the globe is trying to respond with more oil seeds will demand take it and the extra production, you know, not be an issue. Maybe, but I'm not quite there with you. I'm good at 700.
[00:23:13] I'm good at 720, but I think canola, that could be one that's a little bit forgiving. So it's kind of like three different baskets for me. Gonna be patient over there. Gonna be opportunistic on my. On my wheat and maybe my barley as well. And then, and then I think canola is gonna be forgiving. Knock on wood, right? Knock on wood. If you do crop rankings for your farm or want to dive into alternative versions, more than happy to chat, just, just hit me up. Ryan, Denis, Ca and ryanhatthefutures podcast. CA for my email and happy to chat. Chat more about crop rankings and. And what you guys do and how you make them for your farm.
[00:23:59] All right, now this is of course last week, last year. Pardon me. This is of course last year's winner of the hat design contest. Paisley was our winner this year. You know, we're, we're in the last week of accepting designs. Now, Yvonne, who does all things marketing here at what the Futures did, send me a note and say, hey, Ryan, entries can continue to roll in here for the next few days. Our deadline is April 11, but do your best to get them into us, you know, by next week here at, at the latest.
[00:24:34] I, I've seen a few designs come in already.
[00:24:38] I've talked to people, I'm expecting, you know, quite a few to come in this, this weekend. But again, the website. Ryan, Denis, ca. This is a great, great initiative.
[00:24:50] It's in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Agricultural well Being, which again, I just can't say this phone number enough, but 1-866-farms01, that's the farmer crisis line. If you're having a tough day, a tough moment, tough event, you can pick up the phone. You should save it in your phone as well. Save it in your phone 1 866-FORMS-01.
[00:25:17] And there's people that know agriculture, mental health professionals that will pick up on the other end and just be there, be there to listen, be there to talk. All right, so we give these away at Egg in Motion in collaboration with Uplifting. This is the fun part. This is where you get to design it, have fun with it. And we'll put them to a vote here later this month. Could be your hat. Could be the winning hat here for the what? The futures hat design contest.
[00:25:46] Now, before we get to strategy and this meeting agenda, I do want to give a shout out to show sponsor John Deere Now. John Deere Operations Center. A key tool for our farm, my brother, right now, you know, yes, we're getting equipment ready for planting and all that good stuff, but we're also preloading the workflow in John Deere Operations Center. We're getting organized so that when somebody shows up in the field, they can find exactly what they need to do. It's ready to go, locked and loaded and they can proceed with, with the workflow that day. You can set up, manage your critical farm operations plan work to reduce errors and gain efficiencies, monitor job quality and productivity in near real time.
[00:26:36] And then of course, analyze last season's results to improve the season's crop.
[00:26:42] Check it out. Deer CA or at your local dealership. They'll point to you in the right direction. Direction. All right, so strategy, you know, what do I do now? This is not eating your veggies quite yet, but this is, you know, what have you done? What, what do I do now?
[00:27:01] But instead, I, I'd say, you know, what have you done lately? Okay, now we've talked about puts, we've talked about bear put spreads, we've talked about looking at, you know, over the counter options strategies with your grain elevators. Maybe it's the no price established contract at Cargill. You know, maybe it's Forward protect at egg. I3 got green contract insurance. That's what we've talked about. So instead of what do I do now? What have you done lately? Now's the time to review what you've done over the last couple of weeks and kind of feel good about the position that, that you put yourself in. All right, if you went and did a bare put spread or you went and did put options, or you went and did something that was defensive, that, that you, you went there and said, I'm going to go and protect, I'm protecting this price. I'm going to go and grab a strategy that protects this price.
[00:28:06] You haven't felt very good over the last month. You kind of feel like a, like an idiot at times because you sit there and say, what, oh, what I do that for? It's just trading sideways now. It just traded higher and sideways, like, doesn't feel good. Now, though, is the time, now is the time when your hard work starts to pay a bit of dividends here starts to feel good.
[00:28:31] And so now for strategy, it's like reviewing what you've done, reviewing how comfortable you are with that. If you think about it like, it's been a busy couple of weeks.
[00:28:46] I think about it for our farm, I think about the deferred sales that we've made, the physical sales that we've made on three of our four crops over the last couple of weeks.
[00:28:59] Multiple sales. And in most cases, I think about the, the hedge, you know, the Canola hedge that we have.
[00:29:09] You know, I think about when we rolled our, our puts, we initially bought our Canola puts at 690, 680, 690, and then we rolled them up at 740 because, you know, even though protecting 680, 690 was at the time, we felt, hey, it's almost 700, like, let's protect this.
[00:29:31] You're allowed to go and raise that floor if you want.
[00:29:37] So, you know, after we saw the volatility come down A little bit. The options got a little bit cheaper. We went and rolled those up. Or protected 740 instead of, instead of the 690. You can do that, right? Did a little call in west Texas crude. I certainly am not going to be buying a brand new truck or doing anything fancy. It was fine.
[00:30:05] Got to experience that, that hedge.
[00:30:08] What did I save on our diesel price? Like a quarter cent or something like that.
[00:30:14] So not a, not a big, a big win. But hey, we went, got in, got out, got out unscathed. So yeah, so we're all right there.
[00:30:24] Yeah, you know, fertilizer's been in place, highlighting some of those wins and I hope that you are doing that here as well and just acknowledging some of the hard work that you did over the last few weeks, reviewing what you've done lately and then, and then focusing up for moving forward. Because whichever way this goes and changes and evolves, there's always something to do here from a crop marketing perspective.
[00:30:48] Just quickly here I want to go over, like I teased earlier, just agenda. So I've said. Yeah earlier in this recording that it's actually crazy to me. So two farmers told me this. It blows my mind, but it also doesn't surprise me.
[00:31:06] These two farmers said they had hired a crop marketing advisor and that they would have no idea what day the advisor was showing up.
[00:31:19] They knew it would be Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
[00:31:23] Never a Monday, never a Friday.
[00:31:25] But until the person drove into their yard, they had no idea that that person was coming. Which resulted in missed meetings, resulted in very long meetings. I remember the one farm told me the advisor would show up, it's been like six hours. And then our advisor would leave and then they weren't sure when they'd be back, but when they did, they knew they'd be up, up for another six hour meeting.
[00:31:53] That is crazy to me. That's unacceptable. Right? Okay. If you're in the area and you're going to stop for a coffee, like, hey, I'm in the area, you know, could I grab a coffee? Do you want to chat? Sure.
[00:32:05] Every once in a while. Fine. But you know, if you're paying somebody thousands of dollars to be a part of your farm and your farm business, I don't know, I just think that just showing up is a little crazy.
[00:32:14] Anyways, I brought an agenda to the meetings the last 10 years and very rare do I not have an agenda with me now, of course the agenda of the meeting is to make as much money as you can. Crowd marketing. But within that context of that meeting, what are you going to review? What are you going to talk about now? Different times of the years have different agenda topics. In my meetings the last few weeks, you start off actually any meeting anytime, wins and losses, wins and losses. Over the last 60 days, 90 days, just to get the conversation going, what went really, really well?
[00:32:57] What decision did you make that you sit there and say, man, that was cool, that was great.
[00:33:02] I feel good about that.
[00:33:04] And then on the flip side, you know what wasn't very fun? You know, what did you do? What, what decisions did you make here over the last 60 days that you're like, man, that, that sucked. You know, that didn't feel very good.
[00:33:17] Just to kind of get the conversation going and you'll start to pull out themes from that. My buddy texted me and he said, you know, it's not very fun hauling and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's not very fun hauling weed in when you know you're dumping your, your 775 weed. And the, the bid is now eight and a quarter or whatever it was. And he's like hauling in my 1450 canola and it's been as high as 16.
[00:33:45] You know, that might go in the, the loss category. So how can we talk through that? How can we make some of that pain kind of, you know, maybe go away or go away the next time? Right now, this farm we're reviewing, you can place any technology here, but harvest profit. We're going to review harvest profit. So we've, we've sat down, they've added what they want to the agenda. Usually the day before they get it, farm ads, what they want to the agenda, wins and losses, you know, where what's felt good or bad. And then reviewing the platform, the brains of where we're storing stuff, you know, the. Right now it's about crop plan. Just making sure we're on the same page. Any changes to the crop plan? Usually not much right now, but reviewing that, reviewing yield expectations. Has anything changed there in April? Usually not quite yet, but that reviewing our contracts, our percent sold, just getting an understanding of where do we sit today I'm recording this podcast April 8th. If this is the agenda for this meeting on April 8th, where do we sit today?
[00:34:55] And then after that we can figure out where we're going. Next thing on the agenda is just reviewing the trading account, pulling up the statements, pulling up the strategies, just having a feel, getting a sense of okay, you know, is there anything here we need to tweak? Any. Has our Thoughts, process changed around. Is our bias changed in this market by any means? Like, is there any action to take here?
[00:35:17] And then also, do we have our exits? Do we know when we're pulling a parachute here? Are those in place? Just having a conversation about the account, the risk management account, the hedges, the strategies that sit there, you know, now you got your physical stuff figured out. You've got your hedges figured out. You're going to marry those two together. You've got a profile, a risk profile figured out now. And that's kind of the basis right of the meeting.
[00:35:44] After that, I go into kind of like marketing, outlook update on each crop that we're growing, and then bring that back to our percent sold, bring that back to individual strategies for each crop. You know, pricing ideas, our bias, you know, what factors are impacting those markets, Making sure that we have the finer details, you know, tuned in, tuned up for our next decisions. You know, are we all at the table here today saying we think these markets are, are lower, we're aligned? Okay, how, how do we.
[00:36:25] How do we protect? How do we position ourselves in that space? From there, I go into cash flow in one section. So I've got grain contracts. We've got an idea on a percent sold. We have an idea on our, our strategies and our crop pricing ideas. So now let's go into cash flow. Let's talk about when do we need more money, which month, and let's just get the cash flow planner up to date, even while we're there.
[00:36:54] Cowboy math if we have to. But just review cash flow where we sit, and then our next sales, where do we have to make them to get cash flow into a comfortable spot? I also put workflow in there as well, because for some farms, cash flow and workflow may not always align. You may just need to get trucks on the road to get some work done. Maybe it's, you know, harvest movement, maybe it's some goals around movement in certain months. So we talk through that as well. So cash flow is kind of its own thing, and then workflow is, is the next one.
[00:37:30] And then right now, guys, this is where it gets wild. I feel like we're very up to date on the 2026 plan.
[00:37:38] And so there's a line kind of drawn in here, and everything flow forward is about 2027.
[00:37:45] So we're talking about our 2027 crop plan. What are we putting in the ground? Why any crops we want to watch this year to maybe put on our farm for next year? Any varieties, anything like that, that we want to monitor in 26 for the 27 plan.
[00:38:03] But a rough idea on what we're going to grow because most markets, you know, canola wheats, you know, winter wheats, they'll give you a chance, a lot of the malt barley contracts as well, you'll start to get an idea on what you can get for next year in the spring. And so May, June, July, a bunch of 20, 27 stuff's available. And, you know, what are we planting and how does it look? Start to set some targets, you know, maybe some physical targets, but maybe just some mental discipline targets where we'll write down our kind of our objectives, our goals based on current market conditions.
[00:38:40] But we do try to write something down as a starting point and then from there, honestly, we, we have been diving into inputs. Maybe you have your fertilizer bought, but, you know, James Mitchell was on the show a few weeks ago and, you know, logistics are a concern. I met with a farm this week where they had space the fertilizers bought and paid for.
[00:39:03] They did their deal back in November, but they are waiting for a couple loads of product to come in. And he said, should I make that a priority? And I said, if you have the space for it, yeah, don't be on someone else's timeline or logistical situation. Control it yourself. You have the space, you already did the deal, it's been paid for, you might as well have it in store.
[00:39:28] All right, well, we also talked about fuel, current fuel prices.
[00:39:34] We talked about when you go further out.
[00:39:38] So, you know, in this example for this farm, spring fuel was, was good.
[00:39:43] We figured we were covered for spraying season as well, but certainly needed something for fall.
[00:39:51] And so we were just looking at how the, you know, the crude market drops significantly the further out you go. There's some pretty big drops in those months. And so we just kind of decided that, you know, let's look for pricing that represents those lowers the lower futures months. You know, maybe don't buy the buck 50 a liter that's being priced to be hauled in here as soon as you have space, but instead look a bit forward out and see what the forward contracts look like for, for fall.
[00:40:22] Is there a lower price that far out? And then we had, we had a discussion about inputs, we had a discussion about chem and seed and just, you know, what opportunities could present themselves.
[00:40:36] And should we be in a position to, you know, to buy some product or buy a little extra. We talked about fertilizer as well. You know, should we be trying to buy a Bit more or not for, for next year now it's all fluid. We didn't do anything but just having that discussion about, you know, some of those costs and if we can control them at a lower, lower price point. Should we. So yeah and then the last thing here is just setting up that next meeting.
[00:41:09] So we decided it's going to be hard to get together in person.
[00:41:13] We're going to do zoom.
[00:41:15] Ryan, you're recording the meeting, sending the summary out to everybody with action items and we're going to do zoom for the next couple months here and try to get together sometime in, in June. So that, that's the meeting agendas I've got going on right now.
[00:41:32] They have five action items they can list and then take notes as well. And most of the time those, those pages are well filled out so I don't know, something a little different. Not sure if that was cool for you or not, but I wanted to.
[00:41:46] To get that out there anyway and I thought it was kind of neat and top of mind for me and yeah, whatever I'm missing. Love to hear your feedback. Ryan at with the futurespodcast ca if you wanna talk agendas or organizing them. I'm all over that. Definitely, definitely into that. So.
[00:42:03] All right folks. Well, I certainly appreciate you hanging out for episode 117 for eating your veggies. Update your positions guys. Percent sold, percent hedged. Maybe do some profit calculations. That's number one for eating your veggies. Number two is cash flow calculator update.
[00:42:21] Get your fall cash flow sorted out, why don't you? Okay, third one. Discipline, guys. Eating your veggies here. Discipline. Eat your carrots, eat your good stuff. But discipline. Get those targets in. I know people don't like targets, but in this space I like getting targets set, getting some discipline in there and going and getting maybe caught up on sales or making a plan on where you would consider selling your next one. I heard a really, you know, a really fun theory.
[00:42:54] You know, it's called courage calls. Been talking about this with the lunchbox query here the last couple weeks as well. But, but a courage call. I call them lottery ticket at times. But let's say for example that you canola's at 720 and you've done some stuff over the last couple weeks. So you're, you're not, you're not selling at 72750 me. You already did that one. But let's say 800. 800. You're like man, if canola got to 800 like that is a number I would go.
[00:43:27] I'd want as much confidence. How could I get confidence to sell the $800 canola?
[00:43:33] Well, you would go. You could go and consider buying the $800 canola call now. Like, you could say, okay, what's that? 720. What's this darn thing worth at 800?
[00:43:48] And consider buying it now so that when the market rallies there, if it ever does rally there, you can sell it. $800 calls. November calls are 12 bucks a ton tonight. The risk here is that the market doesn't rally.
[00:44:07] And so you bought this call and you, you know, it's not. Didn't do anything for you. You lost premium and you risked as much as 12 bucks a ton. The benefit here is that when Canola gets to 800 or right around there, you could sell confidently. And if the market goes above that, your call option is going to increase in value.
[00:44:30] So it could be used as funds against a buyout. It could help manage your risk and it could help you participate in the gains.
[00:44:37] Again, folks, interesting, interesting concept. I've done it before in the past.
[00:44:44] Yeah, nothing really stands out for a big successful event.
[00:44:51] But yeah, I can talk to your broker or the professionals out there and get that sorted out. All right.
[00:44:57] All right, that's it for eating your veggies for this week. Thanks again, guys, again. Check out all my, you know, all my stuff. Ryan, Denis, ca.
[00:45:06] Tell a friend, tell a neighbor if you've enjoy this week's show or any segment. And of course, you guys have heard my email. Prices can change, strategies can change by the time you listen to this, to the episode. So, you know, just remember that. Always seek the advice of a professional out there for the what the Futures podcast. My name is Ryan and I'm out of here.
