Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fertilizer prices. What are we going to do this summer? I'm one of those folks. Our farm is a farm that likes to buy in the summertime. But what's going on with fertilizer prices as we get just past seeding? Sometimes a little extra inventory, sometimes some deals to be had. 20, 25, is that the case? I've got James Mitchell that joins me in this week's episode to talk about everything impacting the fertilizer market.
Hey, folks, welcome to the what the Futures podcast, your quick guide to better farming decisions.
All right, folks, welcome into the episode here, of course, episode number 79 of the what the Futures podcast. I've got my EchoLM jersey on number 14. Not Jordan Everly, that's Matthias Echolm. Those of you following along for Oilers tickets this week, you know what it's all about. Of course, each and every episode recorded in the UPL studio where seaweed in your sprayer is isn't a gimmick. It's a legit way to boost nutrient uptake and push for bigger yields. Of course, I'm talking about wave. Alrighty. This has been an exciting week from a, you know, personal perspective. My Oilers I recorded on Wednesdays. My game 1 Oilers vs Panthers kicks off tonight. I even have a puck from last year's final. I can't call it my lucky puck because we all know what happened last year, but we'll see. Maybe the fates will be a little different in 2025. I'm excited. I hope you are as well. I love seeing my Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley cup mix here once again. I've had a lot of fun. You know, we've been giving away some hockey tickets on the show both Wednesday and Friday. If you're following along, we got to give away tickets to both games.
But from a crop marketing perspective, you know, things from a, maybe a price perspective starting to get a touch more exciting. But on the back of that, it's because of some of the stress out there, some of the pressure, the much needed rainfall that we are hoping for here next week. You know, I spent earlier this week some time with, with my dad, my brother on, you know, talking about crop marketing strategies and just talking about, you know, reviewing our plans, doing some yield adjustments.
We are in one of the drier areas of the prairies. I know it's not a competition, but you look at the, some of the maps from Environment Canada, you look at what we've seen for precipitation and it's just, it is what it is. The fires are big fires. North of us here in northern Saskatchewan. But it's kind of tough going on the farm. So from a crop marketing perspective here, folks, I see what's coming potentially for rain, knock on wood. You know that we see this big rain event. I think there's going to be some short term implications to grain prices. But I just want to say it's important for you to review your crop marketing plan with the stakeholders on your farm. Bring in the partners that you have as well. If it's, you know, the agronomy folk on your farm, if it's your crop marketing people, even your grain buyers, we had a few grain buyers stop by our farm here the last couple days now, you know, bring in those people that just have a conversation about what you have, what your risk looks like, ways to manage that, you know, what solutions are out there. So don't, don't forget about that. I, you know, I talked to some farms that are sitting in great shape right now, you know, wondering what to do from a crop marketing perspective. Things look really, really good on their farms. You know, when you can sell at a profit, that's always good here as well. The way that I've been kind of treating crop marketing right now is that I think if you, if you look at it, if you're in one of those areas that's a bit, you know, a little bit dry and a little bit uncertain about production, you, you focus up on the, on, you know, the, the quote unquote paper side of, of managing risk. You can always fire up that trading account, fund it with some money and you could buy those, put options or protect yourself, protect margins.
You know, maybe wheat, by the time you hear this, maybe wheat's gone up and made, you know, a fresh high here. We're approaching a three month high. Maybe we go a little higher than that yet in the next days, you know, fingers crossed, if you want to protect that, you look over at that trading account and that's where you can get that done. You don't have to commit any physical bushels. So if you're sitting there a little dry, a little uncertain, that's what you focus on. You know, if you're sitting there, sitting in good shape here and we have this rain event next week, well, prices are going to likely decline, at least in the short term. That's what they tend to do. I'm not saying a bunch of weather premiums been built in yet. I think it's a little, has been a little early for a yield, pardon me, a weather premium, you know, if you start to see some rain events, it could see prices pull back a little bit here. And if you're an area where things are looking pretty good, you gotta stay sharp this week on that crop marketing plan. Take a look at what's coming your way. I can't predict the weather, folks. I just hope we all get lots of rain, lots of sunshine, and grow big crops. But I do see some volatility here coming in the short term. And I Learned back in 21 that 1 rain doesn't make a crop.
I certainly learned that. Like I said last week, sometimes you get that first rain which leads to a second rain, which leads to a change in trend. And all of a sudden you sit there and say, oh, yeah, so the canola high was the last week of May. Hey. Oh, all right. So you got to stay sharp from a crop marketing perspective. But we'll see if we can help you out here in eating your veggies. All right, I this time of year, I like to focus in up on, on fertilizer. I like to look at planning for next year. Not that the work for 202025 is done by any means. It ain't, it ain't done yet. But I automatically just start to switch gears again. I said it already on this episode, but the joke here is that I've sold more wheat for next year than I have for this year. That's the saddest joke. But yeah, there's carry in this market.
Take a look, take a peek for 2026. So we talk about talking about planning.
I switched to planning mode right away, you know, as the seeding. I'm already thinking about next year. I want to talk fertilizer because we often we fill our, our, our tanks up in the summer and I get a lot of questions, especially from lunchbox crew members about, about fertilizer and what to. To look at there. So I got James Mitchell with Crop Management Network that joins me this week. And I also got Maury Mickllich from Pro Grow. He's. He's one of those fancy agronomist folks. Does a little variable rate work as well. We're just gonna check in on what farms can do from a efficiency standpoint. So let's go have some fun with it. Even though the fertilizer market's not very fun right now. Let's see what we can pull off here in episode 79. Let's get after it.
All right, folks, I've got James Mitchell here, CEO of the Crop Management Network, joining me once again on the What? The Futures podcast. James, welcome back to the show.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me. Always enjoy it.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: So I have not paid a lot of attention to fertilizer lately, but whenever I get to the month of June, I think about. I know we've just, you know, are just wrapping up planting or seeding our crop year for the spring of 25, but I start to think about summer fill programs and, you know, what opportunities kind of present themselves.
But before we talk about that, what. What's going on in the fertilizer industry these days? What. What's the big, big news? What are the big updates going on?
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Oh, the big updates. Well, the. The big update currently is India came back to the market for a million and a half tons of urea at a time, at a time where there is not ample supplies of urea globally at the moment. So they've been shorted every tender in the last year. So come for a million, get 700. Coming for a million and a half, get 800. So they don't have an abundance of stocks to go forward. And with that pretty healthy monsoon season upon them, demand will be high.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: So is this a normal timeframe for them to come in to secure urea, or is this out of the ordinary?
[00:08:27] Speaker B: Oh, this was expected, definitely expected.
So at a time where markets are high, it's just a little more bad news for a buyer?
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, fair enough. So you look at the current situation here, the current supply situation, is there a little dip happening at all right now?
I guess we probably don't know this tender result yet, but do we expect a little bit of a dip here that they could buy at a little bit lower value, or do you think it on that side?
[00:08:56] Speaker B: No, it doesn't feel like there'll be any deals to be had for India at the moment.
You know, in North America, we've seen NOLA urea barges come off near historical highs in the last couple of weeks. So that's. That's great. But it reached a point where it was over $1,000 Canadian AMET to import American urea this spring. Crazy numbers.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: Wow.
So if we talk about the spring for a second, I have a few friends that work in the industry, and the one kind of surprised me. She put out a picture saying that they finally got some urea in.
And I didn't realize that there had been a little bit of a mess going on here with maybe production or. I don't know if it was logistics. But what happened at the end of the growing season here with that.
That delay or that Gap.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
This situation was a long time in the works, unfortunately, domestically in Western Canada. Here we had two of the major urea producers have unplanned outages and extended unplanned outages, which forced an allocation situation out of two of them.
So that was a mess in Western Canada.
And coming out of the US early in the new year, low river levels prevented barges having easy access to river terminals to unload, reload on rail and ship.
And then as we got closer to spring, high water levels impacted barge unloading as well.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: So I almost wanted one or the other.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Hey, yeah, it was like the perfect storm. And then railways were just not performing.
So.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: We had a small train of urea that was due to ship April 17, end up shipping May 17, that we just received it the last few days of May.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
Wow.
The values I saw here, I had a few clients that I was checking in with that needed that extra 20 ton or 30 ton or whatever it was.
Those values were just under 1100 bucks a ton at the end.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: Absolutely. And if you're a retailer buying spot urea at that time, there wasn't that much margin in those deals. Retailers were paying well over a thousand dollars for any ton of urea that they were scavenging at the end of season.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: All right, so switching gears here a little bit to maybe the summer again, I like to be, you know, quite planned. My crop plans are already starting to form for next year, things like that.
Often our farm fills. We use liquid nitrogen, so we tend to fill in the summertime. We had a bit of a mess on sulfur. Right. Sulfur prices were pretty bonkers this past spring.
Phosph prices were.
Last time you were on the show, you were talking some big numbers there that happened.
Is there anything here that's changing yet from a supply side that could lower some of these values or where are we at for this summer?
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Well, I'll just start by saying I feel like I should just put my phone on do not disturb for the next month because there is no good news in the fertilizer market to indicate any sort of correction in the next 30 days for sure.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: I'll just go through the products quickly. Like nitrogen.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Everybody's empty.
So there's huge warehouse space to refill for manufacturers. They're under no pressure to come into the market and offer tons.
And we are seeing one of the largest facilities in Western Canada go down for approximately 85 day turnaround this summer, which is going to take about 200,000 tonnes of urea out of the market.
So in western Canada we're not going to feel that push from suppliers to, to fill warehouses and give discounts.
In the US we're seeing again really low inventories, obviously high acres of corn. Planted corn is a crop that gets fertilized more than once. As far as nitrogen goes, we're seeing really high UAE and prices in the US UAE and prices on a percent pound or on a pound of N are 25% higher than urea. So that's going to draw some side dress nitrogen applications to granular urea versus uan, which is going to keep high longer for that product.
So you know, right now for us to import urea into western Canada, it's like mid 7, the high $700 number. I don't feel that's appetizing as far as an affordability, affordability goes to the grower. So you know that's, that's nothing that we're, we're getting excited about on phosphorus. That, that's a huge mess.
China has restricted exports again of phosphorus this year going forward. So typically a 9 to 10 million ton export country went down to 6 and a half last year. This year they're talking 3 and a half to 4, maybe just over 4 million tons. So that's a huge amount of volume taken out of the market that didn't have anything to give.
So coming out of spring we've actually seen phosphate prices increase.
The only thing that fixes that market in the medium term is demand destruction.
We need the US grower to pull back on their fall application rates.
I can't see myself or, and I would not encourage growers to be looking at stepping in on phosphate at this time. We've got carrying costs are a real thing when values get this high. So cost of money is high.
We're looking at a Canadian dollar that probably has some legs against the US dollar sometime in the next 12 months. So that's going to be beneficial for buying imports and bringing for leisure prices down.
So my opinion is phosphate is, is a wait and see product.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: What, what's FOSS at roughly right now? Is it, it's like it's not 1200.
[00:15:17] Speaker B: Or it's not 1300 bucks yet to import into Canada, but it's not very far off.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: So China is that just they're keeping more in their country, keeping more available for themselves.
Is that basically it right now? Nothing on the production side really to impact this. It's just keep it home.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: They're keenly focused on keeping the cost of food low for their People, and for them to do that, they need to keep the cost of production low for their farmers.
If you look at the cost of their nitrogen and phosphate, it's substantially lower domestic China versus anywhere else in the world.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Okay, all right, and what about, do we talk sulfur yet? What are you seeing on that side now?
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Yeah, sulfur prices. To say that they got out of hand would be an understatement.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Last time you were on, the number you threw out was like I had to clean my ears out. Come again? Because it was going to get scary there.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: It did. Retail prices for sulfate were, you know, just under $900 a ton.
Across the west, you know, that number, I think got a little overblown mainly by the producers. You felt them having inventory at the end of spring. The only product that they had inventory of at the end of spring with sulfate.
I think they saw a little bit of demand destruction in the US as sulfur is just kind of a newer nutrient on corn acres. So they didn't get the uptake they quite needed there.
Repatriated some tons and I don't, I don't know, I, you know, Canola acres I think perked up. We noticed a lot of walk up bags in season, guys adding a quarter or two. But I don't think the, the canola acre is an overwhelming number across western Canada. So I think demand was a little underwhelmed there, but better than it was going to be in January.
So that being said, you know, if there's one product there might be a little hope in is sulphur, but it's such a minor nutrient in the scheme of things. It really doesn't make a big deal to a grower's income statement.
That being said, we won't see sulfur correct to previous lows. The price of raw sulfur has went up quite a bit over the last year and doesn't see show any signs of weakness.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Okay, okay.
What about potash? Potash must have a good story for us.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Something stable.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Yeah, potash is stable. You know, as far as affordability goes, is probably as good as any of the nutrients and. But a sulfur doesn't make any difference to the grower's income statement. Potash definitely does. It doesn't. So, you know, I think we could see potash prices in the 600 range. You know, low to mid high 600s, but nothing extravagant. And I would call it boring. And boring is good in our business.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. I'll take boring after those last three.
All right, I want to switch gears now to maybe just globally you know, we talked tariffs last time you were on. I can't remember the exact date of your last time on the show, but it was right, I think before any of the tariff stuff was going on.
I guess, you know, between US and Canada, nothing really new there on the fertilizer side that I can see. But globally, is there anything maybe trade or tariff to touch on here in early June?
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
Western Canada, our price is set by the US Market. Our, the western Canadian price is set by the US NOLA barge market plus import economics sets the Western Canadian price and will be plus or minus an import economic number depending on the time of the year. Obviously summer fill we typically trend slightly lower than import economics and in spring we decouple and typically it goes higher.
What we're seeing now is the 10% reciprocal tariff that Donald Trump applied to other countries is in essence blocking a lot of nitrogen and most phosphor phosphorus imports into the U.S. which is pushing, which is pushing the NOLA barge market higher or stopping it from coming down.
But there's just so much volatility in that, just specifically to nitrogen. You know, the Court of International Trade struck down the 10% tariff and then the day later an appeal court reinstated it. So that's going to go to the Supreme Court.
So there's just a whole unknown about this 10% tariff on, so that's blocking, you know, imports from everywhere on nitrogen except Russia. For somehow, and I don't understand that unless it's a, it's a ploy to maybe soften talks with Russia, Ukraine on the, on the truce that they're hoping there. But you know, to have Russia as one of the only countries unaffected by a reciprocal tariff is ridiculous.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Yeah, interesting.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And then you got phosphates. I mean there's countervailing duties on North African and Russian phosphate producers that in essence blocks them. You know, that's probably an average of a 16% tariff on phosphates plus the 10% reciprocal tariff if it applies to phosphate exporting country. So that's blocking all phosphate imports into the US and you know, that's why we see phosphate barges trading at $725 for a US short. A map which is a crazy number I think, I think it's like one of the, the second worst as far as affordability goes in the last two decades of phosphate. So yeah, these tariffs and countervailing duties, the protectionism is just bad news and it's unpredictable right now and it just adds so much risk to buyers.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's Interesting that you look at how you look at that.
I was looking. This is off, maybe off a little bit of a bunny trail here, but fertilizer costs for US Farmers, very high as well. Right. But farmer sentiment right now on the outlook is high. It's skyrocketed here in the last, the last update last week. And so it's kind of interesting to see that farmer sentiment being high. And some were saying, well, that I don't know how many billions of dollars, you know, Trump dished out there, but that could have been part of it. Was also the survey was done right around a pretty big bull run in corn in middle of May there. So that could have been an impact as well. But yeah, like these inputs being as expensive as they are.
Yeah, this is pretty tough compared to where commodity prices are at, grain prices are at. So I like to spin in some positivity here when we can. James, what do you got from the positivity side? Like, obviously we're going to stay patient right now because it doesn't seem like there's a deal to be had out there, but there's some positivity that you can look at. Higher Canadian dollar. You did mention that one.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, as our dollar goes higher, every cent, our dollar goes higher depending on the nutrient reduces the cost of the product. Seven to ten dollars a ton.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: So if we were to see a 5 or 6, 5 or 6 cent improvement in our $35 to $50 a ton, lower fertilizer prices. So that's positive, I guess. Money in the bank is always positive for, for our business and for growers as well. And we don't look like we're going to be writing any checks soon to fill. To fill and go to market. So I suppose that's good.
I guess there's a bit of a weather market happening in grain prices now. Looks like maybe higher grain prices to come.
If you get rain, that's a good thing.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Yeah, we've been looking at a lot of weather stuff the last week or so and you know, next week. So we're recording this June 4th next week. There's a big event coming through the prairies. You know, fingers crossed, knock on wood, all that good stuff. But it is, it is needed. We, we had a lot of farmers responding to the show here the last week or so saying, you know, my crops are hanging in. I'm pretty happy with how my crops look today, but I need that rain, I need that rain to come through. So, yeah, wheat prices are up right now. Canola Prices are trying to find some support in the high sixes here as well. So we'll see what that looks like. All right, James, anything else that we haven't touched on here today? We covered a lot of different things. We talked global, we talked western Canada or anything else that you wanted to shed some light on here today?
[00:24:05] Speaker B: I don't think I do. I just.
I'm just really just trying to keep my head down right now. And, you know, we're recovering from spring. You know, we've got some planned maintenance on our facilities.
You know, our trucks are kind of taking a breather for the. For the month of. For the month of June, it kind of looks like. So I think maybe it'll just be a quiet summer.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: How did you feel that, you know, for Crop Management Network, how do you feel your spring went? Like, I. I know you guys spend a lot of time and energy on efficiencies and logistics and working, you know, hand in hand with your clients, your farmer customers, but how do you think if you had to review the year grade yourself, like, how did it go for you guys?
[00:24:51] Speaker B: We were extremely happy with how our spring went.
Are having our own trucks, having dual service rail, having a decent size fertilizer storage and infrastructure and blending capability.
None of our customers missed a beat when it was. Was coming for fertilizer. In fact, we filled some gaps from other companies where they ran short and customers couldn't get their product or a customer went over their prepay and they were turned away from their current retail. And we were able to fill those holes. So we felt like we did our job and our people performed admirably. So super proud of our people in our company.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Awesome. Good work, James. Well, that's a nice positive way to end this segment. So here's what I want to do. When there is a move and a shake in that fertilizer market later this summer, if it happens, when it happens, let's get together again and talk about what's going on. All right?
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll do that for sure.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: Perfect. Thanks, James. Have a great rest of your spring and have a good recharge here after a busy spring season.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Okay? Thank you.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: All right, folks, positive moments for this week.
You know, I would say just two quick wins. Number one, just the. You know, the farm being in. In a tough area of dryness, but coming at it from a spot of being prepared, being rational and if top of our game is the right way to say it. But I. I would say it's been very proactive and I. That's been positive. It's just, I guess maybe learning from 2021 and how to approach crop marketing and this type of environment. Again, optimistic for rain and all that good stuff, but calm, cool and collected, which is good.
A second positive moment. Of course, I'm going to loop the kids in on this one, but we got our chickens this week. I call it the $6,000 chicken egg right now because we're, we're heavily invested. We put up a small building, we spent multiple trips at Home Depot, and we, we got these, we got these chickens in our possession. So we got an egg. We got an egg.
What I didn't anticipate, what I did not, what I was not prepared for was the kids waking up first thing in the morning and wanting to go check those, check out the eggs by 5am 5:15, 5:30, doesn't matter. It's before 6. So I grabbed my cup of coffee and we head out and check on the chickens. So that's been great having those around. The kids are doing great with them. And hey, just think, when we have egg two and three, we will be down to like $2,000 an egg and declining. Our investment's coming back. It's coming back. All right, that's it for positive moments for this week.
All right, so I've caught playoff fever here, you know, my Edmonton Oilers making it into the Stanley cup finals here. Once again, I've caught the fever. And so we're trying to have some fun with it, trying to get creative with it as well. And I have a little bit of a discount opportunity here for the Crop Marketing Made Cool conference in Moose Jaw. You can go during the Stanley cup finals. When the finals are over, the deal ends. And this, of course, is our conference from December 9th to 11th in Moose, Saskatchewan. It's bringing some of the brightest minds in crop marketing together. We've got Susan Stroud, that's going to be there.
We have Kyle Sinclair, that's going to be there. Ryan Copperthorne is going to be there, doing some cattle hedging, some fancy work around managing risk around cattle. The list goes on and on. If you want to attend the conference, you have to go to Ryandenee Ca. Hit the conference button. You have to apply. You know this already.
Farmers. We want farmers in the seats. So that's why we do the application. Then you'll get a little code here, McDavid 97. You'll get that at check out. Save yourself 97 bucks on your crop Marketing Made Cool conference ticket for Moose Jaw. Again, just until the end of the playoffs if it's done a sweep of four. If it's game five, game six, it ends right at the end of that evening. So check it out. Ryan, Denis, ca for the Crop marketing Make Cool conference and save yourself some money. $97 a ticket, to be specific, to join us in Moosha.
All right, folks, I've got Maury Micklidge joining me once again on the what the Futures podcast. Maury, how's it going today?
[00:29:15] Speaker C: Awesome. How about yourself, Ryan?
[00:29:17] Speaker A: Not too bad. Not too bad at all. I don't know if you're. I got the Oilers gear on. I got my Echo jersey. You're Cubs fan. Is that what I'm seeing over there?
[00:29:25] Speaker C: Yeah. Kerry Wood, back when I was little, was my favorite pitcher when, when I watched a lot of baseball and then just visiting Wrigley Field. Like, I highly recommend Chicago as a city I'm not a huge fan of. But yeah, Wrigley Field is wicked to catch a ball game, especially on a nice day. Few cold beers, tough to beat.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: Nice. Are you. Are you going to root for the. The oil as well? Are you an Oilers fan in your neck of the woods?
[00:29:52] Speaker C: I cheer for players more than I cheer for teams.
[00:29:56] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:29:56] Speaker C: Oilers would be my. Oilers would. Now that Ovechkin's gone, Oilers are our next up.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: All right. There you go.
All right, Maury, last time we had you on, we were. It was part of. There was seven people that joined me just talking about tariff stuff.
I want to change gears. Not that, you know, tariffs are important and it's definitely impacting fertilizer prices. We'll get to some of that here in a moment.
But I wanted to just kind of start off with, you know, you farm out of Holden, Alberta.
How's the spring going for you guys?
[00:30:30] Speaker C: Spring went well.
Seeding was. It seemed like it drug on, but this is probably the earliest start to spraying we're gonna have in quite some time. Crops look really good.
[00:30:41] Speaker A: Good.
[00:30:42] Speaker C: Canola was in the ground. Like, canola started popping out at like five days.
It's amazing how fast things have gone this year. I think everyone's schedules probably a week ahead, week and a half ahead of where we kind of were last year was tough just without what we were.
But yeah, this will be the earliest. We've kind of moved in the schedule in quite some time. And with how everything looks like, yeah, I have to be careful what I say regarding rain because everyone's kind of in a different spot. But for us, like, some guys are getting panicky over rain, but forecast has us getting a shot at the tail end of next week. I think that'd be perfect. Let us chew through some in crop and then give us a rain and go from there.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I was giving away those tickets here the other day so I asked a bunch of farms like, you know, send in your name for the tickets but also give me a crop ranking. And I got a lot of average, you know, lots of average, lots of above average as well. That was way more than the poor side. But everybody's saying like we need a drink here sooner than later. And I've been diving into weather forecasts here a lot the last 48 hours and it looks, looks promising for next week. So fingers crossed.
[00:31:56] Speaker C: After playing in the mud, this is the kind of weather I like. It may like it's early. We have not ever lost a crop this early. So I'd rather be dry and then just even just timely rains because I just, I have PTSD with mud.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: So I.
Back in the day I used to run some contests from the consulting company I had and one was, you know, sending in your pictures of getting stuck. Like this would have been like 20, like 17, 2018, like back then. And so those pictures come through regularly in the spring for me as like reminders on social media like, oh, remember this? And I'm like, oh yeah, no, I don't want to remember that. Just all these pictures of stuck tractors and all that good stuff. So anyways, all right, so you're busy out in the field on the farm. You're also out there working with farmers. Pro Grow is the name of your company. Pro Grow Ag. So what were you working on this spring and what stands out from that side of your life and your business?
[00:33:02] Speaker C: So I cover two ends of the spectrum here. Early spring.
A lot of my business is I am a SWOT map partner. So what that means is I own a few swap boxes. I do swap map mapping.
April May is developing maps, uploading the scripts into guys monitors service calls. Like if anyone has an issue, I'm out there diagnosing the monitor, making sure that's all good, kind of nursing everyone through seeding season. So that was April May, just making sure everything worked, everyone was good to go. There's always a few hiccups like that's just the way honestly the precision ag side in manufacturers equipment is probably one of the least focused on areas. So there's always a hiccup here or there.
And then as we transition into in crop now it's. It's the consulting side of weed ID like timing things and getting into plant stand counts. Making sure my seed scripts. Okay, we based on 10 mortality in wheat, we want 31 plants per square foot. Are we close in every zone?
You know, just doing some follow up, make sure everything kind of worked how we wanted or looks how we wanted and getting guys recommendations on time to spray. You probably should be looking at this to spray.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:19] Speaker C: Especially now if we do stay dry. It's. Well, I was planning on using a growth regulator.
No rain in the forecast. Hot.
Don't necessarily know if that is a road I would go down at this point. But yep, just stuff like that.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:35] Speaker C: Trying to get everybody organized and into the game after seeding.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: And so when you're out there doing your plant counts and checking things out this spring, you know, are things, you know, similar to, to where you farm. Like obviously you're covering an area probably close to where you farm, but everything's looking okay as well. Checking that stuff out.
[00:34:56] Speaker C: Pretty wide swath of guys who can't. I, I shouldn't say happy because that's a pretty loose term. But there shouldn't be much complaining like everything has come up nice. Everything looks good.
A pretty consistent issue. I am seeing a dirty word up here that we've never really seen before.
Kosher. Kosher. Kosher. Kosher has really crept up here and moving forward that is gonna have to be a focus for guys because that is a. As of the southern Saskatchewan guys, Southern Alberta, Southern SAS guys know that is a nasty, nasty thing to deal with. So that's going to be one thing to look out for moving forward.
[00:35:40] Speaker A: Alrighty. Okay, so I had a chat with James Mitchell as well from Crop Management Network about fertilizer on this episode. You know, you're out there focusing on variable rate and efficiencies and putting the right products in the, the right spot. Well, I tell you, Maury, you know, talking to James, he, he doesn't want to be doom and gloom like he wants to spin something in a positive light. But yet as I look at my notes from that conversation, like it's a little bit scary here on the, on the cost of fertilizer right now. Like it, it's, it's a little nasty out there.
[00:36:21] Speaker C: Yeah, it's, it's. I don't like to be like my word that I always load up and use is efficiency. I'm looking for efficiency and risk mitigation. That's for me. Like you can claim, oh, VR will give you two bushels. I really don't like that claim.
I use it more as an efficiency tool.
Are you getting return on investment on? It's looking like we're going to be in that twelve to thirteen hundred dollar ton range for fossil.
Where is your efficiency on that ton? Where are you going to get return on investment on that ton? It's honestly with fertilizer now it is a lot of risk to just I'm going to slug 350 pounds of blend everywhere. That is a lot of risk. That's a lot of money.
So it's just where can I get that efficiency out of the ton? Where can I maximize that value out of this ton? It the blanket approach now is getting extremely expensive and extremely risky. Like yep, we stay, we stay dry out around Holden. Everyone likes to associate Holden with Solana gumbo. You give this dry hot weather another week, those gumbo areas are going to cook off and it's not going to look great in those low spots.
Great buy slug $110 an acre worth of fertilizer there and I'm gonna get a big fat zero out of it.
[00:37:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I can't afford to do that here. Yep, yeah yep, yep.
So I'm all about planning nice and early planning our farm right now south of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. We're, we're in. If you take some drought maps, some rain maps like you look at our area and it's, it's dry. All right. We haven't had much anything from a precipitation perspective. And so for, for us we, you know, we were having our meeting this morning going reviewing some of our crop marketing stuff, also talking about our application and our seeding, sorry our chem applications for this year, what we're going to do there. But also looking at next year's crop and you know, we'll see what happens here. We're optimistic for a rain but if not then we might incorporate some, some winter wheat or something like that. But I'm big into planning and being organized for next year because my running joke here on the show is I have more wheat sold for next year than I have sold for this year. So you know, when it comes to planning, is there a time where if a farm's interested in, in efficiencies and you know, going down this path of variable rate.
When, when, when do you start? Like when, when do you engage with farmers to get the started?
[00:39:03] Speaker C: Like as you know, I'm like for me personally, my phone's always on me. So it's, it could be 9 o' clock at night and I'LL get a text oh hey, what do you think about this? And I'll reply. So I'm I'm kind of a a phone like a addict that way. If you want to call it that. Like I have a tough time kind of separating that side.
But yeah, honestly, if someone is looking at that side of things, like whether it's point forward me main croptimistic with SWAT maps anyone.
Sooner the better. Like if a person can have a plan in place and know okay these acres are going to need to be done, I can have stat say it's next week. Okay, I know I need to hire two more seasonals, three more seasonals to make sure everything gets done in a proper time and that sort of thing. It's the more time you give a company to plan, the better. Whether it's me or anyone else. It's everyone needs time to plan. Like the tighter you make that timeline, the more difficult it is for anyone in the business. So it's realistically, anytime, anytime.
[00:40:15] Speaker A: And ideally, you're getting this work done in the fall after the combines roll. You're out there getting this done before big snows.
[00:40:23] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:40:24] Speaker C: And then even in the spring, like spring mapping because I physically have to drive the fields. If guys like to see me squirm and play around in the mud, that's that. I. I'll do it. But I'm usually stuck once a day, twice a day. Like it just is not. I make masks. It's just not not ideal. The snow. I'm not too worried about the snow because I can bomb through that. Once the snow, the ground freezes. That makes sampling a lot more difficult because you'll just bend probes and that sort of thing. But yeah, fall times the best. Like if a person can have a plan in place and let whoever they're thinking of no way in advance, they'll have that plan in place. They know they need to get it done.
Easy peasy.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: Awesome. Sounds good, Maury. Well, thanks for coming on the show this week and giving us some info and some tidbits here and folks can get a hold of you. Progrow Ca is your website. You want to throw your email out there as well?
[00:41:22] Speaker C: Yeah, it'd be Miklich M I C K L I C H at Pro gro ca. That'd be Pro gro ca. I'll have to keep you posted. I forgot to mention the farm.
We're actually growing lentils this year. Some red lentils.
[00:41:36] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:41:36] Speaker C: So if that goes well in East Central Alberta, I will probably Grow more. They look great at the moment, so we. I'll keep you posted on that one.
[00:41:45] Speaker A: Awesome. Sounds good. Good start. All right, man, have a good rest of your spring and we'll check in again this summer.
[00:41:50] Speaker C: Yeah, you too. Thanks for having me.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: All right, folks, let's go with eating your veggies here for this week. Again, I'm going to just steal from the opening here, but it is June, everybody. Look. Let's look around us here. It is the month of June. It is time to dust off that crop marketing plan. If you haven't already.
Here's what I want to see you do. I want you to review what you have outstanding for contracts. I want you to review what you have outstanding for targets. I also want you to do a little yield update. Where do you sit today? Are you going to do a little plus or a little negative around yield? You know, we have a very short crop. It's not going to be very tall here in. In our neck of the woods. It's just for wheat and peas. It's just not going to be a tall crop. Can't change that.
All right now.
So are we. Are we doing anything for adjustment? Are we going to put a little negative in there because it's short, right? You never know. Things can surprise you. But we did, we did put a little negative in this week just to make up for some of that short crop. Again, we could have a perfect season the rest of the way, surprise ourselves, but it is going to be short. So dust off that crop marketing plan, guys. All right? See where you're at. Make sure you're comfortable and you've got everything tidied up here because spray season is full swing.
Probably already full swing for you, but it is full swing.
Cash flow review.
Now that you have your contracts and everything sorted out, just do a little. Even if it's a bit of cowboy math where you just write some stuff out roughly, just check where you're at here for cash flow. I'm not talking about June cash flow. I'm more talking about where you're sitting for September, October, November, and start to tie that in with your crop marketing plan. All right. Can you do that for me? Awesome.
And last one here. I'm not going to say that you need to go sell this and do that. And like, I'm not going to say that for this week.
What I'm going to say here is that everyone's looking for a rain. Everybody's looking for a rain. And we get many times throughout the season where we get to these.
I don't know if I don't think it's pivot point is necessarily the right word, but you get to these times a year where you just get maybe that change in momentum. And so, you know, if you can sit here and think for next week, if the rain events were disappointing, you know, what does that do? It becomes a storyline. It becomes a headline. The Western producer prints it. You know, like drought, all that stuff starts to happen. Right? So what, what does that look like if it does rain? If the rains are better than expected? What does that do from a crop marketing perspective, from a price perspective?
This, to me, I would put this up. There is for 20, 25, for the entire year up till now.
Oh, man. I'd say the most important crop marketing week.
I would for 25 crop. Now, you could argue with me and say, Ryan, that was when tariff stuff was going on and the market sunk and we had confidence that we were patient and it rallied. That was the most important decision and the most important week. Maybe, maybe. But this is. This is big, guys. This is big.
That's why a little office time this week, just spending a little time figuring out your plan on how this moves forward. It's a big one. So I'm not, I'm not out here saying you got to go and sell everything or you got to go and buy everything back or whatever, but this, I'm just saying eating your veggies, number three, is just awareness of how important this week is for you. If you don't believe me, well, that's up to you, but go and spend a little time in the office. If you're listening to this on the weekend, Monday, little office time for you. All right. Especially if you're busy spraying and if these rains come in again, one rain doesn't make the crop, but a pivot, there's going to be a pivot here in what markets do. One way or the other, be prepared for it. That's all I'm going to say. Eating your veggies. I hope that's clear. And we'll check in next week, see what.
See what happens.
All right, folks, thanks for joining me here once again this week. I know the fertilizer topic's usually a bit more exciting, and it looks like we'll keep our, our pennies and quarters and loonies in our pockets here for the time being, the way it's playing out. Thanks for hanging out. It's been a heck of a week with playoff hockey going on. That's been a lot of fun.
We've got our leaderboards here. We've got Justin leading the lunchbox crew playoff hockey pool.
And I think, man, I think he's going to take it home. But we will see.
And then, of course, we've got Eric that's leading the what the Futures playoff hockey pool as well. And so we'll see. The guy behind him is not a big fan of our new prime minister, I can tell you that much. But there is less than a point separating them. So it is going to be a heck of a finish. On the what the Futures podcast playoff pool, which of course, the winner gets a pair of tickets to an Oilers or Oilers game play our playoff jeepers, right. NHL game of their choice next season. There we go. What else do I have here to wrap up the show?
Yeah. Oh, I've been doing some live stuff, so it looks like we're gonna aim for Tuesdays, one o' clock is kind of the goal. I'm not saying it'll be there every single week, but a little extra. What the futures. I'd say Tuesdays or Wednesdays in between those two. You know, one of those days we should hit a little bit of a live episode, one o' clock again, go to the YouTube, hit the subscribe button. You'll get the notification there, and then they will go out as little podcasts later on that day or the next day or something like that. So. All right, folks, it's been a lot of fun here this week. Let's go, Oilers.
And for the what's Futures podcast, I'm out.
