Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Think about what you could do differently if you knew completely what you had from a quality perspective. How much quality or grade are we as a farm giving away every year? Unknowingly, we do a great job with yield, but when it comes to quality, we don't have as farmers, we don't have the ability to measure that. So we really can't do a whole lot from that perspective. This, in my opinion, is coming and is going to be something that becomes a mainstay. And it's going to be across the board. Everybody's going to be using it. It can set that golden standard where when you are dealing with unknowns, what do you do? You cover your ass. And I don't care if you're on the farm side or the grain buyer side. You have to. I don't think farmers are crooks, you know, being one of them. I don't think grain buyers are doing anything nefarious. What could I do with this information now? And what are the. What are the things that I haven't thought of before? And you can't manage what you can't measure.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Hey, folks, welcome to the what the Futures podcast, your quick guide to better farming decisions.
All right, folks, welcome into episode 91 of the what the Futures podcast. I hope you're having an outstanding end of the week here. This episode should be hitting you late Thursday evening. Of course, each and every episode recorded in the UPL studio is. And I just have to acknowledge, I get a little inside track, inside info over at upl, right. They're a partner of the show, big sponsor of the Crop Marketing Made Cool conference. We have a lot of dialogue, a lot of discussion. They are adding staff right now across the prairies. They are looking to grow their team across the prairies in a space where you see a lot of cutbacks, a lot of layoffs, a lot of uncertainty. They're going for it. They're. They're getting after it, and they are growing that team. And I think that's a cool thing in Western Canadian agriculture right now. So hats off to UPL on that one. All right, I.
I did a live episode here Monday, Labor Day earlier this week. If you didn't get a chance to catch it, I'm going to get in the habit. We're going to do the live episode on YouTube at some point. We're going to toss it as a podcast in that platform. We're gonna toss it out there for a couple days, give people a chance to listen to that live episode. It's. It's Unedited. It's just the straight cut. Get people, you know, give people a chance to check it out and then, you know, we'll remove it and move on. So the live episodes, you'll see those coming across here as a short, well, not short podcast, but for a short amount of time, they'll pop up in your, wherever you catch your podcast. Right? So if you want to see the live show, you can check it out on X.
We're working on Facebook and Instagram right now. And of course you can go to YouTube, hit the subscribe button.
We have more than 500 subscribers now. Hit our goal here, our summer goal. Last I checked, we were at like 5:32. So thank you so much. Keep hitting that subscribe button on YouTube and help us grow the channel over there.
Even by the time you listen to this, there is a good chance that I've done my live episode Friday with Chuck Penner left field commodities.
We're gonna try to drill down here on 10 different 10 different commodities, 10 different crops. Try to give some perspective. And so even by the time you listen to this, that live episode may be available as well. All right, so Chuck's my first live guest, so we'll have some fun with that for Positive Friday.
That's gonna be what, September 6th? Something like that. September 5th. There we go. So let's keep moving along here. It's challenging, folks. You know, I hit the record button late tonight for a couple different reasons. Actually, those of you checking this out on YouTube, you can let me know if you notice the difference in this episode. There is a slight change that happens in episode 91, and I might have to figure out a prize for whoever guesses it. But there's a little change that happens, something that I've been working on for the last while, and we' we finally got her done here. I met with my podcast editors, we made some tweaks, got some things done. If you let, you can let me know what you think that is. But that changes in this episode and we'll see if we can hook you up with with a prize. I hit record late. I had my fantasy football draft tonight as well. I, I, I've got a draft with 11 farmers across the prairies, a big NFL fans, and the trophy currently sits at my brother's house. It's a ugly, ugly trophy to display, but it makes its rounds. It's at my brother's house until we crown a new winner. And we just wrapped up our draft here as well. So NFL season kicking off this week. For those of you that enjoy a little football down under there. Down under. What am I saying? Down in the U.S.
all right, now, crop marketing right now, folks, there's a lot of stuff to talk about, but it's obviously not a lot of fun. Like, we've been here before.
We've gone through this before. But I would say, for me, the difference. The difference is that some crops are facing some steep declines that are making everything else kind of magnifying the pain of everything else. Like, I was looking at my Bungie wheat price here earlier today of 6.10 a bushel.
And I said it many times on the show last year, where buyer called, the price of wheat was like 6.38 or, I don't know, between 6.30 and 6.40 in the fall. And so all I'm saying is that, you know, we've been to this spot. We were here last year. Look at a Minneapolis wheat chart.
It's about the same, right? It's a little bit worse. Obviously, we're seeing the lowest future since December of 2020, but, you know, it's about the same. Okay, the problem here is that the narrative out there from the folks in the industry is that we had a cooler summer, we had some cooler weather, and that, you know, resulted in a large crop last year. We had everyone saying this is such a big, massive crop in June that it took us until wintertime to convince the industry that this crop actually wasn't that big. All right, now, maybe stats can made some tweaks to that later on, but you know what I'm saying, right? This year, we're now seeing, you know, harvest results, and not for everybody. Like, I look at the Peace region, the crops up there, not stellar.
You know, for the most part, they're coming in below, you know, crop insurance index levels.
I look at the drought in northeast Alberta as you travel north there, like it was, you know, those guys were harvesting peas in late July. It wasn't great there. But, you know, there are large swaths of the prairies that are pulling off some. Some good yield. Yeah. And so the narrative out there from everyone is, hey, there's a big crop here, bigger than we expected.
And we don't have the demand that we would like to see or not yet anyway. And we're seeing a sharp decline in lentil values. For example, you're seeing that big decline in lentil values because Australia has a big crop coming now as well. And.
And we have a big crop. Apparently. You're seeing it in Yellow peas and green peas. With the tariffs from China, you know, you're seeing that market really under pressure. You know, you're seeing feed barley, you know, just getting absolutely hammered right here. We had that initial drop in feed barley values held steady. And I was looking here before I hit the record button and, you know, feed barley's dropped another, what was it, 20 bucks a ton. So, you know, like, you've got that going on malt impacted by that as well. We got our malt offer for the farm and yeah, it's better than the feed market, but, man, we're taking some losses, losses in our, in our malt program here this year. All right? So, you know, it's, it's across the board and it's extremely frustrating and extremely challenging here. Now, you know, hopefully, hopefully you're in a position where you sit here and say, hey, I'm just, I'm executing the, the contracts that I, that I already have in place. I'm just going to execute that, get that delivered and wait for some better times, avoid harvest pressure. Right? I even look, you guys, look at the Canola market last year. The Canola market last year, Nava of 25 traded as low as 588. Here, what, September 13, right? This is Canola's trading 617 right now. Last year, almost on the same date, we were trading 615. Right? We've, we've been here. We have been here is all I'm trying to say. You know, you find a low of that market, harvest low at, you know, 580something, and you still have a peak coming in at 7:50, right? Anyway, so, yeah, it's challenging out there. It's not fun. I hope you're in a spot where you're just executing on, on your contracts.
You know, the little problem here, the little hiccup I see is just trying to work our way out of this narrative and trying to find the demand story.
And when you talk to the folks that are buying these commodities, you know, they say, yeah, we can get there, but we have to get there at lower values. If we want to compete globally, we have to get there at lower values and that will get us moving more, more crop out the door. So we will see where this all goes. I do have some strategies this week. I do have a couple things that I want to highlight here. Just a couple comments on some different markets.
And yeah, I just encourage you if you have questions, if you want to review strategy.
I'm doing this each and every day. And you can certainly Send me a message.
Ryanhatthefuturespodcast.ca works for an email. I can hit me up through the website as well. I'm here to see if we can shed some clarity, some, some light on some of the scenarios and see if we can help you out a little bit here this, this harvest. All right, that's why this show was created, was to help farmers navigate these difficult times here in crop marketing and, and try to find some little wins along the way. All right, I made some notes here. Spring wheat futures, you know, lowest value since deceive 2020 KC wheat, lowest since October of 2020. Canola. We were this low early April, April 3rd, April 4th, around there.
Corn's $0.20 off the lows. You know, this, maybe the biggest yield number was printed. And we got a little bit of, had a little bit of a rally there. And same thing with beans.
$0.50 off the lows there as well. So actually some strength in US Corn and US soybean futures, so that's good. All right, before we get into some crop marketing stuff, I do have Kyle folk joining me this week from Ground Truth Agriculture. We're going to talk about some of the latest technology here on, you know, being developed across the prairies. I, I was joking earlier this week, Labor Day, that, you know, there's a heavy dew. And my grain graders, it was, the only time they'd buy donuts was at harvest when a weather event would happen because they knew they were going to make. Make some money, make bank that winter. So I joked that that was the only time they brought donuts. But Kyle's company, they are, they are trying to take away, you know, the, the human element to this. Like, not. He didn't say that in those words. I'm just, you know, the way I look at it is take away the human element because grain grading is very subjective. You know, you can throw the same sample in front of five different people and get a couple different scenarios out of it. So they had an update here late August, and I wanted to get Kyle on the show just to talk it through and. Yeah, so stay tuned for that in our conversation later this episode. All right, song of the week here. Let's get. We started a little poppy. We started a little light on the karaoke. Of course, you can find the playlist with the futures harvest 25. That's on YouTube. Music.
We started with just a couple of light songs to get your vocal cords warmed up. Now we're going to turn aggressive. All right. We're going to. We're Going to go with Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit because, you know, sometimes it feels good just to get out there and get, and get some of the rage out. You know, when markets aren't going great, when harvest is maybe a bit of a slog, you know, go and get, you know, maybe it's a workout. Instead of breaking something, maybe you just go and do a workout and lift something heavier. I don't know what. But let's get more aggressive this week. Let's go Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit. So really turn in a 180 on you for this one from here. I want to, I just want to give a little bit of, a little bit of love here to the Harvest photo contest as well. You know, we are drawing our winner here in mid October.
All you have to do, folks, you're out harvesting is snap a picture. If you have the what the Futures podcast flag in the picture, I'll give you a bonus entry as well. But you snag a harvest picture, you go to the website Ryandi Ca.
There's a spot says photo contest there and submit your picture and you get entered to win a trip for two. Halifax, Nova Scotia. All right, the Canadian Curling Trials. You have tickets to every draw. If you're a curling fan, this is the trip for you. November 22nd to November 30th. You have three meals a day in the VIP lounge, tickets to all the draws, $200 spending spree for merch in the store.
I stumbled upon this package, got lucky and, and was able to snag it and hotels already booked. Your flights are covered. A nice little getaway, Canadian getaway after harvest here to go watch some top notch curling in our country.
So go and check that out. We might have a little update on, on just some additional, additional benefits of that package as well. In the next couple of weeks here we had a partner step up and say, hey, this is cool. We want to see if we can help you out on this and provide a little more, let's say like white glove service. So we got something there that we're cooking, cooking up at, at this moment. So stay tuned. Over the next few weeks, we'll, we'll talk about that. So we got the Harvest photo contest. That's great. You guys are also kicking butt here. You're doing great on the subscribe button on YouTube, but you're also kicking butt now on the voicemail. All right, so if you go to what the Futures podcast ca send voicemail is the button that pops up. Ian, Carl, Val, All Submitted voicemails here after the live show on Monday.
And you're going to get entered to win. We're going to pick at the end of the month here, but we got this John Deere multi tool. You know, you can never have too many of these kicking around.
And we've got these great John Deere yeti mugs as well.
I just want to see if my camera's picking this up. There we go. John Deere yeti mug for you.
And hey, maybe a little courage. We'll go in with that. We'll see. We will see. But big thanks to John Deere, of course, the voicemail sponsored by the Crop Marketing Made cool conference happening December 9th to 11th in Moosera, Saskatchewan. This is the crop marketing conference put on for you, John Deere, proud partner of ours for that event here. So thank you, John Deere. So there we go. Keep those voicemails coming. All you have to do right now, this week, this is it. You just say, hey, Ryan, my name is whatever and I am X percent harvested. You know, that's what the folks are talking about. Val was 40%. Carl was 50% harvested. I think Ian was somewhere around 30%. So keep it coming, folks. That's all you have to do. Nice and easy this week for the voicemail button. All right, crop marketing here for this week. I've got odds and ends written down. Okay, So a couple things here. Obviously you guys know what's going on from a market perspective.
You know the trend here. Every crop I talk about is at lower values. Like if, if I want to get the warm and fuzzies about a crop, feeling good about a crop, It's. It's like $18 flax.
Like that is where I'm like, oh, wow, that's nice.
That's real nice. You know, let's put some yield beside that. Hey, there we go. Like that. That is about it. Like green peas.
I got lucky and made a green pea recommendation at 13 to 14 bucks. Green peas. Now I'm happy the bids are back.
You know, the bids are back in town. I think we can make a song about that.
Use the Boys are Back in Town as the background music. You get what I'm saying, right?
So those bids are back. $11 a bushel. So, companies, if you were thinking of using force Majeure on your $15 contracts, guys, you know, we got, we got something to talk about here, all right? Because you guys are back in the market with bids. You can't use force majeure and, and have a bid to Buy at a lower value. So just keep that in mind. You're on notice on. On that one. Maple peas, $10 a bushel. You know, that bids back yellows 650 to 7.
Now, Chuck's gonna join me here on Friday because there's a rumor going around that our yellow peas are too cheap.
And Chuck said there's a rumor coming out of India that they may put a tariff here on, on those Canadian Elps. So we'll keep an eye on that. RPs might be getting a little too cheap. And yeah, Chuck and I will. I'll get him to answer those for us. That question for us on Friday's live show.
So there we go. You know, you start looking at things and it's a challenge, right? It's a challenge out there. There's not a lot of fun stuff to talk about. Well, a couple things I'll note here. So I got laughed at the other day, and I'm going to talk strategy in just a minute here. I got a couple strategy things that want to review, but I got laughed at. I locked in a basis. We're chatting with a farm and we ended up locking in a basis at the Crush plant. It was a minus 15 canola basis.
And, you know, the buyers, the buyer's kind of laughing at us and saying, hey, well, you know, it's going to get better than that. You know, I wouldn't lock in a minus 15. But we were all kind of comfortable with that and made that decision before we called. So we just continued on and locked that up.
You know, now you look at this a few weeks later, and this is not like a home run success story by any means, but the posted basis now is like a -25.
And as a joke, I phoned a different buyer to say, hey, like, I'd like to get a minus 15.
And they laugh. They're like, yeah, good luck. You know, our basis is just getting worse. And our merchant says it's going to get worse yet, of course. Right? And so, you know, it's just basis is under pressure right now because we are all going to the same destination. I have not looked at the export figures this week.
I have not tried to find out how much canola is being loaded in a vessel in Vancouver.
So, you know, maybe I should do that shortly. But I have not done that. But we're all going to the same spot. The one thing with the Bungee Viterra merger, like, now for our farm, our, our Bungee, our, you know, what used to be Vitera location.
You know, we'd have a quote to deliver there, and that would be part of an export program. I'm sure they did flip some over to the crushers, but it'd be part of an export program, you know. Now our, our bid is just into this small crush plant in northeast Saskatchewan that, you know, all these elevators are, are feeding.
So, you know, it's just one of those things where all this early canola is being, you know, used up. Domestically, we have great crush capacity. That's all good, but we're all going to the same spot.
So it's hard to rally a basis when you have big volume coming in from the line companies. This isn't new. It's not new by any means.
You know, I have a local buyer here where they don't export any canola. They have a canola bid and they, you know, they do a great job of moving it into Cargill and into Bungay. And, and that's what they do. They make, I don't know, five bucks a ton doing it probably, and away they go.
Yeah, so this isn't new by any means, but it's just one of those things where, you know, in the short term here, your basis levels at your crushers are.
Yeah, I don't know if they're going to get a whole bunch better here the next eight weeks. You know, hopefully after that they smarten up, get some export program going.
But yeah, it's just another one of those little negative stories that I want to keep an eye on. I told you I was worried about demand, right? I said I was worried about Demand in episode 90.
And I was waiting for a merchant to reach out to me and say, ryan, you're an absolute idiot. You don't know what you're talking about.
We had great demand. That didn't happen yet. So merchant, please give me a hand here, you know, let me know that demand is phenomenal so that we can get off these harvest lows and get some better pricing going.
All right. I also want to make mention here from a crop marketing perspective, protein premiums. If, if you are pulling off high protein wheat, like special high protein wheat, good quality wheat, I would just, you have a negotiation piece. From what I can see, there's a small negotiation piece. Now. It, it happens often where you get a couple vessels sold of high protein wheat, you know, right off the combine.
You may not get more of that done later on this year. Like you may not see that again. But I'm just, I'm a little bit Curious here if there's a low protein problem and I just want to highlight, if you have high protein, you might want to just put, tuck that in the bin. You just tuck it in the bin for a little bit until we sort this out. I don't have the answer for you, but just think about it until we sort this out because maybe you're sitting on something special there. All right? On the flip side, if you have low protein pulling off big bushels, low protein, get those discounts locked up. Now I don't know what all the discounts are across the prairies, but if you're a couple cents per tenth going down on a protein spread as a, you know, a negative number, go and lock that in, you can make a phone call. Most companies will allow you to convert your schedule once, premium or discount, you know, they'll lock it in and say, hey, I just want to convert this, I haven't delivered anything yet. Or you deliver, you deliver a load on, it locks in your spreads. But there's a little something brewing. It may be nothing, it may be these first vessels disappear and not come back. But if you have a big wheat crop in the northern plains, maybe some low protein issues there, I just, it's something we gotta dig into and figure out. All right? Other than that, I would just say from a markets perspective, I looked, I looked at everything, folks. Like I went through a bunch of stuff and you know, there's a little premium for gluten free oats out there. Like, you know, that's fine malt offer, you know, high fives for a price, you know, that's a lot better than four and a half for feed barley, things like that. But yeah, it's a grind. It is a grind. Well, folks, I, you know, I talk with farms each and every day and obviously it's, it's what I enjoy chatting with farms, trying to figure out strategy solutions. But so many people that I chat with, you know, 4H comes up all the time. You know, the 4H sales, the 4H kids out there, you see all of the great things in the 4H program. The great, you know, people that come out of that, you know, the leaders that come out of 4H and you know, here's just a couple Fun facts. But 4H kids learn leadership, teamwork, confidence, public speaking is a big 1 in 4h.
And the best part is that 44% go on to work in agriculture.
All right, that's cool, that's impressive. I want to acknowledge here, John Deere, Canada, through its foundation and Local dealers.
They've just invested $175,000 into 4H Canada.
And this funding supports initiatives like the Citizenship Congress and members forum across seven provinces, reaching somewhere between 1500 and 2000 youth. So, you know, in a time where, you know, there is a lot of negativity in agriculture, 4H programs are a strength and great support in our local communities.
Great resource to have as well. And so hats off to John Deere for supporting those programs. So here's what we're going to do. Let's get to Kyle Folk with Ground Truth Agriculture. Let's get to that conversation. I'll come back at you with some strategies. We'll do positive moments, eating your veggies and, and then I'll get you teed up for my live show with Chuck on Friday.
All right, folks, for episode 91, I have Kyle Folk joining me from Ground Truth. Is it Ground Truth Egg, Kyle? Is that what we, what the name of the company is? What do you guys go by?
[00:26:43] Speaker A: Yeah, we go by Ground Truth Ag, but officially we're Ground Truth Agriculture. But Ground Truth Ag is good.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: All right, well, this podcast is a little bit laid back, so we might just keep it at egg for you on that one, but. Awesome.
All right. So, Kyle, I listened to a podcast you were on with Dan Eberhard. He's doing a series here bringing in entrepreneurs, bringing in some of the newer businesses, technology across the prairies, and just shedding light on what's going on. I was very intrigued. I've been watching from the sidelines for a while, but I'm intrigued at what you're working on for a project. And why don't you tell listeners a little bit about what you guys are up to over at Ground Truth?
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. Well, first, I'm, I'm glad to hear I piqued your interest. The marketing team is doing something right, if that's the case.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: So we've, we've set out to automate the grain grading process ultimately, you know, from, you know, the visual aspects, the non visual aspects, kind of be the one stop shop, Ryan, for grain quality. And that's not just at the farm gate. That's all the way through the supply chain. And I think that's an important element because with, with grain quality, if you can't do something consistently at every step through the supply chain, inevitably you're going to have these discrepancies that everybody's going to say, well, I don't care what you did over there, because this is what we do here and we Want to eliminate that process to make it a lot easier for everybody.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: So right off the bat here, I have to ask, are you talking to the buy side of this equation? What type of friction are you seeing?
[00:28:17] Speaker A: Yeah, so coming from farm, myself as a kid, you know, growing up, sending samples, bagging samples, those kinds of things, I was well aware of the, you know, from our perspective, I will say just from our perspective alone, we had some concerns with, you know, who was bearing all the risk. Were we getting the short end of the stick when I come up with this idea and I started going out to the industry to speak to these grain companies because ultimately, Ryan, if we don't have them on board, this is going to be a very difficult thing to achieve. And so right off the hop, I went out to them and it was very, you know, it was a. It was. It was great when I started talking to them to realize that they were very interested in this. And across the board, everybody I talked to on the grain side was like, please, if you build this, we are a buyer. We would like to have this. And some of their shortcomings, Ryan, that they're dealing with ton of labor problems. There's. There's jobs that just can't even be filled in certain rural areas. That's a major, major problem for them. Takes up to eight years to fully train graders, which that's based on environmental. I mean, you know this from your background. And then graders are expected to be about 80% accurate. So you can imagine that that causes them all kinds of problems once they have custody or even trying to find the grain to fill contracts.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, the. The labor thing, definitely, that was one thing I highlighted with Dan after, After that episode was the labor savings that, that you'd see here. And labor is an issue across. Across agriculture. So that's really interesting to me that the friction point is low on that, on the buy side, because, you know, my background as a.
As a buyer, you know, way back in the day, I joked earlier this week, I did a live. A live hit. And it was. There was a heavy do the morning I recorded. And I said, you know, back in 2009, 2010, the buyer, this would be the. Or the grader. Pardon me, this would be the only day that they would buy donuts for the whole office. They would come in with a smile on their face, clicking their heels together, buying donuts because an event happened that could change grade. I'm not saying that the dew changed grade earlier this week. I don't think it did by any means. But when weather events happen, that's how grain companies, that's how they make money, right? So, you know, we had a, we had a location budget that you had to hit.
It's a seven figure number in blending. It was a big number and you had to turn something in your facility better by, you know, seven figures. So I, I, yeah, I, I'm a little surprised that there's not as much friction there. So what about from the farmer side? What kind of feedback are you getting? Farmers testing this out on the farm? Like, how's it going on that side?
[00:31:12] Speaker A: I would say overall it's going really well. I think, you know, the biggest thing from a farm perspective, not just the ones that are testing it, but, you know, we knew this from the get go is getting this to be something that can be that de facto, you know, quality standardization or equipment that can provide this standardization.
And so, you know, farmers love having an understanding of what they have from a quality perspective, not something historically that has been available to us. And so knowing that and starting to be able to make some decisions or even just, even just having an expectation when you're, you know, sending, filling a contract or sending some loads to the elevator, that's been very well received.
But then starting to think about the next things of, like, what could I do with this information now? And what are the, what are the things that I haven't thought of before? And, and what's the saying? I've said it before on a, on a couple things, but you, you can't manage what you can't measure. And so we do a great job with yield, but when it comes to quality, we don't have, as farmers, we don't have the ability to measure that. So we really can't do a whole lot from that perspective. So the, the response has been good. And then I think we get into, Ryan, we get into the whole, like, how much quality are we as farmers giving away every year? We don't, we truly don't know.
So that, you know, that starts to become a, a thing that once you can actually understand what you have from quality standpoint, you can start to get a grip on.
[00:32:39] Speaker B: So what, like today, you know, you're harvesting a wheat field here the first week of September.
Like what, what characteristics, what, what are you analyzing right now? Like what's available via analysis today with, with your, your tech?
[00:32:53] Speaker A: Yeah, so our best model today, we started with hard red spring wheat. That was the, you know, when we set out into this, started talking to the grain companies, they all said, hey, Hard Red is one of the hardest, if not the hardest grains to grade. If you can tackle that one, the world's your oyster kind of thing. And so start there and achieve the most difficult thing. So we did. And so we can determine over 50 different characteristics in Hard Red Spring and not only say that they're there, Ryan, but we can actually tell you how much is there, too. So, you know, the gamut from, you know, fungus to insect damage to all kinds of, you know, sprouting mildew. You talked about dew, so it goes across the board. Now we even break it down, Ryan. We're not even just saying, oh, there's mildew there. Mildew is actually, you know, we follow the Canadian Grain Commission guide. And so, yeah, mildew is part of degree of soundness, as you know. And so we actually break down degree of soundness. We show you, oh, this wheat would be a number two based on degree of soundness. We don't just leave it at that. We let you click into that and see what within degree of sound has caused it to be a number two. And then we show granularity within there as well. And we don't just tell you It's a number two. We say it's a 2.1, a 2.2, or a 2.3. So if you know, then you know if It's a good two or a bad two.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:12] Speaker A: And HVK is the same thing. We break down. There's about 30 different things in Hard Red Spring that can determine that can downgrade your hvk. We show you all of the aspects of what's downgrading your hvk. And I mean, for me, Ryan, when I got into this, this was a ton of stuff that I didn't even know. It's out there. It's public information. I'm sure there's a lot of guys that know it, that. That, you know, know more about it than I did, but, yeah, I have learned a ton since we've been into this.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: The one thing that does drive me a little bit nuts, and I. I used to see this back in the day, like, someone would come into the elevator for a grade, and, man, I just. Actually, I'm just daydreaming now of the rooms full of samples we had and the, hey, I'm bringing my sample in, and the delay, like, getting your grade back could take a couple of weeks, you know, depending on when you brought them in. So, yeah, markets move a lot faster than that. But I just. I just was thinking that people would walk in and if you told them, hey, you know what? This is a really, really nice number two, you know, they were just defeated. They just were so sad that it was. But if you said, this is the ugliest number one weed I've ever seen, the joy, the joy on their face that they got a number one, even though it was the ugly number one, there's a huge difference between that one and that two when it came to the emotion around it and those expectations. So I'll be Honest, Kyle.
The 2.1, 2.3, 2.5, whatever the scale is, it does drive me bonkers. I just want to know, is it a one, a two, a three? I don't. Within that scale, to me, it doesn't matter.
It does drive me a bit bonkers at times. So. All right, you talked great commission for a second there.
How's your relationship with the folks over there? And are they receptive to what? To the project that you're working on?
[00:36:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So right off the hop, when I first started this company around, kind of before we really had much of anything, I reached out to the grain commission just to say, hey, this is what I'm working on. This is what we're doing. We're not trying to ruffle any feathers. We're trying to do this, you know, based on your guidelines and the regulations that you have in place, and just kind of kept that communication going with them. And now recently, they just launched publicly that they have a process in place for products like ours. So visual or non visual, but visual, specifically grading factors to apply and get into a project with them where they will do an assessment of the technology and see how well it performs.
That's not to be confused with certifying anything. They don't do any certification, but they will do an assessment of the tech and see how well it's going. So we have put our application in there, and we're pretty excited that the grant is first ever. Right. That the grain Commission has got this process in place. So we're. We're ecstatic because that's a change that, you know, benefits everybody, in my opinion.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be.
I'll be curious to see how. How that evolves and that involvement as you guys move forward here. Like when back in the day, so we would get a package from the grain commission, I think it was from the grain commission, might have been from head office, but they would send you these little, like, petri dishes of all the different grains and pulses, and then they would tell you this, you know, this is a one, this is a two, and this is a three, and a feed and so on and so forth. Is the only time I ever saw a number one pea was in those petri dishes. Yellow pea is never grade number one for anybody ever. Right. It doesn't have to, but those little dishes had some number one yellow peas in them anyways. Wouldn't it be, wouldn't it be kind of neat if, if those, those samples were tested against your equipment, you know, your. What you guys are working on as the standard. Wouldn't that be kind of neat?
[00:38:17] Speaker A: Oh, it would be fantastic. Yeah. I mean, I think that's important when we move forward in this, you know, whether it's us or another company or multiple companies.
This, in my opinion is coming and is going to be something that becomes a mainstay and it's going to be across the board, everybody's going to be using it.
I think kind of what you're describing there is very needed in the industry because it can set that, that golden standard, if you will, on, you know, this is kind of the data set that everybody needs to match and line up with. And then, you know, because the thing, Ryan, as we develop our product, we are continually and forever going to be updating and improving models.
And, you know, we have stuff internally built that we can validate against to make sure that we're not, you know, affecting something negatively when we update something else. But I think that's. That would be, that would be, that would be amazing if we had this gold standard at some point in time. And I think it'll come. It's just, you know, this is still, although been tried for many years still, I would call it new.
[00:39:20] Speaker B: Oh, def. Yeah, definitely. You know, we talked a little bit before hitting the record button, you know, like the, I'm sure grain elevators, the amount of coffee they go through must be a fraction compared to 20, 30 years ago. Because we talked about moisture testers, right? Moisture testers weren't.
You had to go for a drive and go for coffee to check your moisture.
Yeah. You know, there was, you know, I think about protein machines back in like the. Maybe it was like 2015, 2016. Protein premiums went bonkers and a few farms bought refurbished protein testers. Right. Every load was getting a protein check. I don't know. Like, do you think if you crystal ball it, do you think that this is like adaptive technology in my, you know, John Deere combine one day where I'm seeing these live readings as I'm harvesting?
[00:40:13] Speaker A: Yeah, very much, actually. We are testing on four combines. At this moment, it's operating on four combines throughout Saskatchewan. And so, yeah, yeah, we are, we are doing exactly that. So we. Right now they are. One of the combines is running through hard red spring wheat and he is getting GPS located information and it's telling him if he's got any damages, where it came from in his field. We're seeing a number of. We're pulling a number of images per acre. And so over the course of a day, instead of, you know, getting that one five gallon pail at the end of the day, the other day he collected 750 images and a whole bunch of NIR spectral scan, actually thousands of them. And so being able to take that data and know that, okay, what we put in that bin today was this is changing things for sure. And for him too, also being able to know down to the location in the field that some things that he didn't want to see were popping up. And so now he can determine if he's going to do something different or see what happens next year. But, yeah, it's going to change some things for sure.
[00:41:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Cool. All right. Now this is a bit of a loaded question, so I apologize for this, but I want to ask it anyway.
Do you think today, the system we have today, from a grading perspective, do you think that, you know, the farmer is, you know, pulling the wool over the eyes of the grain company on a load of grain for grading, or do you think it's the grain company that's kind of winning that battle today? Like, fent farmers are giving up dollars and cents from a grading perspective, like, and nobody that's listening, don't get offended about this question. It's just, it's an honest question and we'll see where it goes. Don't get mad at me or Kyle for. For asking or answering. Okay?
[00:41:59] Speaker A: I. I have said in other times, I'm speaking about things, Ryan, that I don't think farmers are crooks. This is my disclaimer. I don't think farmers are crooks. You know, being one of them. I don't think grain buyers are doing anything nefarious. And I truly believe we need the CGC and, you know, in the US the usda. But I don't think anybody wins that, Ryan. I really don't think anybody wins. I don't think a grain company wins and I don't think a farm wins. And the reason I say that is because when you are dealing with unknowns, what do you do? You cover your ass. And I Don't care if you're on the farm side or the grain buyer side. You have to. You have to cover your. Your ass. And. And so then.
Well, then who's getting the short end of the stick? Well, whoever you're dealing with. And from a farm perspective, I, you know, I'm trying to do what I can to, to make the most money for myself, too, but I don't know what I'm working with. So, you know, I guess you could maybe say that the farmer with less information doesn't really know what they're working with as much.
But the grain buyers are not out to get anybody. I could tell you that at the end of the day, they're filling a contract downstream the same way that a farmer's filling a contract. Once they take custody of that, they got the same problems that farmers dealing with putting it through. I just want to be able to give the farm the ability to grade that the same way that a buyer can. And so now everybody's on the same level playing field. I mean, it's not, I. This is not talked about, Ryan. This is the. Don't shoot the messenger. This is. There's no, there's nobody on the other end of this. But, you know, in a year where stuff starts showing up, that's not good. And from a quality perspective, but if, If a farmer sneaks something through. Right. If I'm the farmer and I. And not even knowingly. Right. Just I. I sold something, I delivered something, and I got away with something. Maybe I realized that after the fact. Maybe I don't even know when that becomes known at some point in time. And that might be after the rail cars are loaded and it's going somewhere else and they discover it further down the line.
[00:43:54] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:43:55] Speaker A: There has to be right setting that happens somehow. And so it's not like they're going to come back on me for that, but they got to make sure that their contracts are filled accordingly with the right spec. And so they're going to have to. Then, you know, maybe they got to take some stuff that's a little worse or a little better and fill that and blend that into the right, you know, recipe. Anyway. I just don't think anybody wins without the information.
[00:44:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
As you're saying that, I just think about even the machine on the other end, whatever country is buying this, they buy a number 2, 14, whatever spec, and they sit there and are excited about the consistency. This can come down the entire pipeline.
Maybe. I'm starting to see why the buyers would be on Side with this here, too.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say, too, Ryan, if I could just. That from a buyer perspective, they blend grain. We all know that. There's no secrets there. They blend it well. What are they going to do a better job of blending grain that they know what the quality is or grain that they're guessing what the quality is.
And then with working with the farmers, they're going to be able to work with us a lot better if they know what they're working with versus this unknown all the time.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
And I got two things to add there. But as a. As a buyer and as a grader, history and relationship, it comes into play as well. And I remember the graders we'd be doing this is Canadian wheat board days, but you'd be doing some type of deal.
The elevator manager, everyone would come together, they say, oh, this farm, whatever they say they do, they deliver whatever they said, they have that history. Right. And that would pay dividends for the farm often to be like, yep, we know that they're going to deliver what they say and that that pays. Pays the bills. The. Oh, my. One other comment. So for me, again, you can. People get mad at me at this one if they want, but you have a facility built where its goal is to maximize.
Maximize spec, maximize shipping, be efficient.
If farmers, we put up big bins and big bags, we do everything in bulk. And so we set up poorly to take advantage of the specs from the Canadian Grain Commission or the specs of our contract that we're signing. If we knew that we could blend 5% of other grains into this load and could do it efficiently and effectively without causing an alarm or raising a flag or getting a penalty, you know, we would do it, but we're just not equipped for that. We build these massive structures that just are not equipped to, you know, be very specific. And we're again, we're kind of like Costco, where whole. We're selling it as wholesale and trying to be as efficient as we can. We're not trying to maximize blending and stuff like that.
[00:47:02] Speaker A: So anyway, that same. That same theory, though Ryan applies, is applying now across the board. So graders. So you touched on it. We used to go into the elevator and have a coffee and get a moisture tested or take a sample in and have them grade it. We weren't in an extravagant amount of hurry to get. You know, it was like a bit of a social outing.
[00:47:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
[00:47:23] Speaker A: And now, though, now at the scale of which farming has accelerated to not just on the farm, but at facilities as well, so you have to think about what you just talked about is we don't set ourselves up quite right. This is across the board. And so a grader is expected to grade a sample in, you know, sub 10 minutes when it's being delivered to the facility.
Well, there's no way. So I can tell you we here have graded samples fully. Like every single thing that is in a sample. We had a human grade it that had been grading for his entire career.
Um, he's retired and he comes in with us here all the time.
It takes about a week to two weeks to grade an entire sample. Working eight hours a day because there's so much stuff to count in that sample.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:09] Speaker A: Now if you're doing it specifically down to every minute, little detail, that's what it takes. It's insane. So now do it in ten minutes. Okay, well, then you have to focus on what's the worst thing in the sample. What am I looking for? Let's get it. Let's do it. We're against the clock. Let's get this done. Well, then take that. And now you're loading a rail car. You're loading a rail car in under four minutes at a lot of facilities. Now, how are you doing a great job of grading that grain that's going into that rail car that is moving down the line and going somewhere, like you said, to some other destination. It's very difficult. Then you get it to port. The Canadian Grain Commission is grading one sample out of every 2,000 tons that, by the way, has already been loaded onto the ship. So then they grade it. If something's wrong, you're about 3,000 tons behind, and you got to say, stop. So this scale that you talked about that we don't set ourselves up, it doesn't just apply to the farm. It's all the way through. I mean, something needs to give here to be able to handle this scale and the clip at which we need to feed the world.
[00:49:09] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, we're. We're not going to get any smaller. Right. So we. We need the technology to catch up for sure.
All right.
I heard the other day an elevator was upset about a grade being different at the coast than what they had sent and the penalty involved. And I always associated that with just head office penalizing them. But maybe there's. I don't know if there's a green commission penalty or not, but if merchants listening or someone in that.
On that line, in that line of business. Reach out to the show here and let's get some clarity around that.
All right, Kyle, I got one. One more comment here.
So we had three graders when I was working at.
Well, it was Vitera back in the day. I don't know. Don't know if you remember Vitera, Kyle, but it used to be called Vitera. And there's three graders. And people would phone in and say, hey, I'm scheduled to haul this week. Who's grading? And we'd say, well, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is this person. Thursday, Friday, Saturday is this other person. And they'd say, okay, we'll see you on Thursday.
So it just, you know, you had the notorious. They were almost these notorious, like, gangster graders out there. Everyone knows them. They all have a history, and they were, you know, one was more lenient and one was a little stricter is how it went. So. And we had one guy who was kind of in training, so he kind of flip flopped. You didn't know what you were going to get with him any given week. So anyways, all right, now, you know what. What do you have here for. We got farmers and combines and trucks here listening. Harvest time. Like, what message do you have for them when it comes to ground truth? Ag.
Is there. Is there anything that they should be thinking about right now or. Or reaching out to you guys about?
[00:50:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, while you're out there, while you're harvesting, while you're trucking, think about why, what you could do differently if you knew completely what you had from a quality perspective. So, you know, that whole. How much quality or grade are we as a farm giving away every year unknowingly? And where could we, you know, zero in on. On being, you know, better with it or understanding it better and, you know, reaching out to us and letting us know what those things are that you, you know, hey, this situation occurred and if I had known my quality, you know, we could have saved ourselves. You don't have to give me numbers, but we could have saved ourselves some money. And those things. For me, I hear them quite frequently, but I'm always fascinated that the more people start having this kind of mindset with, you know, having. What would I do with an understanding of quality? Love. Love hearing that stuff.
[00:51:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, we have some years or years are different, Right. And even today, 20, 25, you have a little protein premium here that's starting to, you know, evolve. We don't know what that's going to be yet, what that looks like, but there's that heavier discounts on. On some of this lower protein. If you could Figure that out on the fly. You know, you could definitely extract some value there and then we'll see with, you know, some of the weather we've had. It's.
Some folks have faced a pretty wet start to harvest and, you know, how could you evolve and change?
And even then, like, from a buyer perspective, you know, this might be a number three for these, the certain spec, and this other one might be a number three for this certain spec, but if we put them together, maybe it could turn into a two. Like, there could be advantages like that as well, where you have different factors and you cancel them out and you make something better out of it, so. Absolutely.
[00:52:50] Speaker A: I mean, downgraded because of test weight and then you have something else that's downgraded because of something entirely. Yeah, I think 100%.
[00:52:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
Cool. Now all you have to do next is build a database where you have all the sample results in it where farmers can like, partner up and be like, hey, that guy has. I have a different issue than that guy. I'm gonna. Let's get our grain together and maximize this. So there's an idea for you in the future.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: There you go. The.
The non. Non infrastructure elevators going out to the farm.
[00:53:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, Virtual. Virtual elevator. There we go. Yeah. All right, Kyle, appreciate your time this week during harvest. Thanks for coming on the show and yeah, best of luck to you guys. I. I'll be staying in. In tune with what's going on and looking for the latest and greatest updates from your group there at Ground Truth Ag.
[00:53:40] Speaker A: Thanks, Ryan. It's been a pleasure.
[00:53:44] Speaker B: All right, folks. Well, that was fun with Kyle going over, you know, grading and the industry that way. We do have a survey out. If you get the emails on Friday. We do have a little blurb in there and then we put, you know, past episodes so you can kind of play around with that a little bit. But we do have a survey going on and the one thing that came back, I'm just asking for your opinion on. On the show and, and what to do and, you know, getting a. A mix of guests in, just getting some different perspective in, you know, that's come across as one of the themes. And of course, it could be crop marketing all the time, but there's other things going on like Ground Truth Ag and what Kyle's working on. So I thought it was cool to. To have mon. And we're going to check in again here after harvest and just talk about some of the results that they saw. All right.
Okay, so I want to talk strategies here for A second.
I'm actually, I'm gonna get like the original gangster here of crop marketing. Of course, the, the theme for the conference in Moosha is, is this kind of gangster Chicago, Al Capone theme. And so I don't know if John will appreciate me calling him like the gangster of, of crop marketing here for Western Canada. But John Depape, I'm gonna have him on the show hopefully next week, because this, a strategy that I've been executing on for the last number of months here is. Is writing, writing call options, you know, selling calls. And I, I strongly encourage you to. To reach out to, you know, maybe it's through your, Your grain buyer line company. You can do this through them or your broker, reach out to the professionals. The ones that, you know, are.
Have all the certification to go over this stuff. But it's been an effective strategy for my farm and for my clients just writing these call options. And the other day, I put this in with the lunchbox crew as well about writing calls a couple weeks ago. And at the time, you could sell a $700 call and a November call, 700 bucks, and you were going to get 22 to 25 bucks a ton.
So you just receive that, Receive that premium. Now if the market goes above that level, above your strike, then, you know, you are. You are basically committed at that 700. So, for example, if you sold or wrote a $700 November call and got 20 bucks for it, you know, your, your 720 would become your break even on that. But if you went to 730 or 740 in a rally, you wouldn't be participating in that. You'd be. That'd be a marginal position.
And so you're basically. It's not a target, per se, but it's.
I set it up as, as a, in my example, as kind of a target. Like, where would you sell canola? And I had 680, 700, 72750 as a number, and I had the values of what you could write those calls for.
And so right now you're just, you know, if I wrote that call, a $700 call, I probably sitting here at like 8 bucks now to get out of that thing. So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, in the good by 15 bucks a ton or something like that.
And so John actually, he's got the trading floor is the platform that John has launched here not long ago.
And he had a great explanation of.
He said, this is an update on our paper targets and A great explanation on, you know, selling on paper. And he's gonna come and talk through this, writing these calls because yes, they're selling grain 100% and selling grain at the, when the signals are there and when it's the right time and all that stuff. But there's, you know, crop marketing is 24 7, 365.
And this is just a way where you're extracting some premium out of the marketplace.
It's not really that uncomfortable if you're willing to make, you know, cash sales at those strikes that you're, you're writing those calls at.
But it's been very effective for me. Like I have calls that we wrote, you know, we wrote calls at 8:20 in, in June, 800, 750, all the way down to 650.
And some of those, you know, we received over a dollar a bushel writing those calls. And you know, as of recording this, everything is, we haven't taken on any losses. Kind of wish we did.
Right. It just means the market would have rallied and you always have something to sell crop wise. So it's just a way to extract value. And John's example, again, he'll talk about it next week, but you know, he's extracted here since August, like 21st. He's in line to extract about 78 cents on his strategy per bushel. And again, you're just looking to piece together these little wins along the way that add up to that path to profitability to, you know, positive margin. This is a bit of an aside but, you know, I don't want to go on, I didn't want to go on this episode or any of the episodes here over the next, you know, four to eight weeks and say, you know, this is the stuff that we have done, like this is the stuff that you should have done, blah, blah, blah. Like there's I, I'm nowhere near perfect. I'm nowhere near perfect, far from it. And that doesn't help anybody. Like that doesn't help anybody moving forward. What you should have done, what I wish I would have done, doesn't help me tomorrow. And so strategy wise, I'm just looking at, you know, looking at things that, that I, that still in my opinion makes sense for these little wins along the way. And yeah, it doesn't help you to go back and say you should have, could have, whatever.
Yeah, we'd all be a lot, you know, we'd all be on some island if we knew how to do that. But live in the big, living the dream. But anyways, you see a lot of that right now in the space. And I should have ranted about this a bit earlier in the episode, but it doesn't help anybody telling us what we should have done. It's what can I do today, what can I do tomorrow? Right in this scenario. So anyways, this is still a strategy. You know, I was looking at 680 March calls, you know, writing those calls and extracting 50 cents on those ones. Like there's just little things here to. To work on.
Identify your trends. You're in. Figure a strategy around that. Okay.
On wheat, very well documented on this one that, you know, selling these.
Oh, man. Early movement. Not calling it a special early movement. Selling early movement on spring wheat, replacing those with call options. And Casey, wheat, for the most part. A little bit of Chicago in there as well. A little bit of corn.
But you know, Casey, at the money December call, you know, it's about 20 cents. 20 cents plus your fees. Right. And so if you could extract. I've set it, you know, the, the early movement price is 750. And then they take that away and you're staring down a 670 like, what the heck happened?
Right. It's not true stuff. But, you know, you're starting at 750. Maybe you put 10 or 20 cents against that call option as a cost.
You got upside potential again. I just think it's a way that you could still be moving wheat here before the big glut slows us right down.
At some point, folks, farms harvest the crop, put it in the bin, submit the samples, and then make a game plan. And I just.
It's. Yeah, it's got to be. It's going to be tough here. It's going to be tough. It already is tough. It's going to get a little bit tougher as we work through that. All right, so this is just one way where I've got some clients just rifling weed out. The weed is just flying out the door. And we're participating in upside a different way.
Last thing, strategy wise, I just wanted to make note of this one here as well. Yellow peas could throw green peas in the mix here. You could throw maples in the mix as well. I think I have maples.
We have maples Pre sold at $17 a bushel. Yeah, so it's just about, you know, figuring out your average price. So I had a, you know, farm the other day where they sold some $7 yellow peas.
We. It was part of our cash flow plan and part of our space plan to move these P's. And yeah, we weren't happy at seven by any means, but our average price for the year was 883. And I've had this conversation a lot of times the last couple weeks, but just figuring out your average price, I'm not saying that you should sell them at seven, but if you say, hey, how did I do? You know, I sold bushels here, here, and here, what's my average price? Like, maybe that gets you to break even or to a profit. And you can look at that a little differently and say, okay, you know that that's not that bad. I did okay marketing my yellow peas here in 2025. I can move these out and move on. I don't know when the next vessels what it looks like. Is it a December P program at what price should be higher than these harvest lows, I would imagine. But it's just one of those things where if you need to generate the cash or the space, just think about your average price and maybe that'll make you feel a little bit better in, in the decision. All right, and last thing here for strategy is just taking a peek at the carry in the wheat market. You know, looking at that 50, 60, 70 cents out there for next year again, does that come back to a break even for your farm? I don't think anyone's doing numbers right now.
Hopefully you did them earlier. But what's your break even look like for 2026? Is there a path there to profitability and can you take advantage of that? All right, the trend is your friend, folks. And right now the trend is down. So how can we get ahead of it, you know, as best we can? All right, so positive moments here for episode 91.
I. Well, you know, preschool started this week. It is, it's one of those rare. One of the rare families. So Will is doing her third year of preschool because she has a fall birthday.
And, yeah, you know, we made the decision for one more year of preschool. So we have, we had an emotional day one of the third year of preschool, and Finley's going to start preschool here in January when he turns 3 years old. And so first day of preschool, going through all the, the rigor, you know, rigmarole there of, of everything, but, you know, it's great. You know, Willis, Will and her mom did back to school shopping and she had her, her outfit picked out for today and her new shoes. And you remember how it was when you were a kid as well. But going back to school, it was kickoff of the year and you know, is the only new pair of shoes I was going to get for 12 months and my new outfit or two. Right. And so it's always special.
You know, it's fall time, harvest time, my favorite time of year, as well as the fall and preschool kicked off for this week. We also, we wrapped. Well, we didn't wrap up camping. I got the family convinced for one more camping trip. But we had a great week of, of camping here and, and some great weather and yeah, yeah, the other thing too, if I want to throw this as a positive moment for my, my brother and my dad here, we'll, we'll throw it in here as well. It's just, you know, the, the slow pace of harvest on our farm where you, where you get some days off between crops so you get that rest that well, needed rest after a couple of big days. So we're, you know, as of recording this, hopefully we've started on wheat, but last test was 19%.
We're going to go and take it here right away. We'll run some through the dryer. But yeah, it's been a bit of a slow start here for harvest, so getting some rest in between. All right folks, that's it for positive moments for this week. Okay, so for eating your veggies this week, I actually didn't have much written down. I again, I think that some of the easy ones here would be like, you know, taking good samples.
You know, I think, I don't think that's going to blow your socks off from a strategy perspective, but especially in wheat, your Durham, just knowing what you have, just make sure you take some good samples and you know, maybe there's a way to extract check premium later on this winter from that.
You know, execute, execute your plan. Stay laser focused on what you need to accomplish.
Don't try not to over, try not to not overthink it, but try not to be overwhelmed by the, like the, the whole thing, if that makes sense. Like boil it down to where am I at from a cash flow perspective?
How far am I, am I along here if I deliver my contracts? Like, what am I good for with cash flow? How far can I go here? Because if you can buy yourself some time, you know, we'll get through our harvest lows and then see where we go from here. And so what does that look like?
It's really. It's over. Can be overwhelming when you're looking at everything as a whole and trying to figure out what to do. But if you can, you can breathe a little easier if you say, wow, I just did the math. I'm good for cash flow until November 1st, or I'm good until the new year. You know, buy yourself a little bit of breathing room.
You know, your collar won't feel as tight, you'll feel a little looser, and it's. It's challenging. It's challenging when you've got the stress and the pressure. And we usually don't make great decisions when that's going on. So just try to break that down into a smaller chunk and execute that part. All right, so for eating your veggies, I would just say, yeah, kind of execute with laser focus, but also try not to. Try not to take too big of a bite here on the whole. The whole thing.
Yeah. Other than that for this week, folks, for number three, if you are inclined, you know, the one thing you can do is. And this might help you a little bit as well, sleep a little easier is just, you know, figure out strategies where you can deliver grain but also have upside potential. So again, you know, sometimes we get through harvest and we look back and say, man, was that ever stressful. Those lows really, really sucked. And then we get out of it, and we're like, wow, you know, the rally's on here. Something's happened where prices are climbing. And we say, you know, in some cases, you sit there and say, man, I sold too much. I sold some at the low there. What was I thinking? Anyways, just talk to your buyers out there, your brokers about, okay, like, how. How can I do something here? You know, if I need to generate some cash or I need to move some grain, what can I do and still participate in upside down the road? Like, what's available to me? And that, again, that's just another thing that will help you sleep a little better here down the road. All right, so that's it for eating your veggies for this week. All right, folks, well, I certainly appreciate you hanging out with me for episode 91 again, I'm gonna go live with Chuck. Friday, September 5th, 8:30 Mountain is when we're gonna get after it here. And we'll send that out to you as soon as we can. You know, it's just that time of year, folks. You know, reach out. Reach out to the people on your team. You know, you don't have to make these decisions on your own. You've got a partner in the farm, in the business. You've got, you know, a spouse to support you, family to support you. You've got industry folks all around you here that want to help as well lean on those people during these times.
We'll get through this. We'll figure it out. We've been here before.
We'll get through it and go from there. All right, if you enjoyed this week's episode, please share it with a friend, a neighbor, colleague in Western Canadian agriculture. Again, thanks for spending some time with me for the what the Futures podcast. My name is Ryan, and with my new camera this week, I'm out of here. All right, take care.
