| Clay SEIA - 9/6/2014 21:25 I very much enjoyed what you did there, and have been thinking about it some today. It seems to me there are a handful of agricultural commodities, corn being probably the paramount one, that have experienced a really unique set of circumstances since the WWII era. You have the rapid perfecting (OK, still improving, but unprecedented progress compared to the 5,000 years prior) of mechanization, the wide and fast acceptance of things like nitrogen fertilizer, herbicides, and hybrid seed. Then you have a political and economic landscape which didn't exist before the Industrial Age which builds a demand base far different from anything known before. Maybe parallels could be drawn to the oil/coal industries, textiles, metals? Could a person generate charts like that for something that was trading back in the Age of Sail when global markets were in their infancy, but information moved at the speed of a horse?
That's a bit rambling, I am very much intrigued by the history- but just pondering how to interpret the last 40-odd years of corn markets, or 100-200 years of industrial markets, in relation to human behavior and cycles in all of recorded history. The simple fact that you are thinking about these things puts you ahead of 97% of the population. Clay, You bring up some very good points. And honestly, I don't really know how to address it. The technology available globally - not only to the ag sector, but to all industrial sectors - has grown exponentially like you noted. The only thing I can say with any credibility regarding this is I was told by people that understand many disciplines of higher learning better than I ever will, that there is nothing in charts made today that didn't exist 5000 years ago. Even though we have gone through the industrial revolution, and technology is exponentially better, EVERYTHING that exists is still governed by the same rules of physics that existed before human existence. As you know, the world didn't just get the awake one morning, with the laws of physics, engraved in stone, sitting on someone's door step. They were developed over centuries, and before that, even though we had no deep understanding of them, they still existed. I would guess that this process continues today, and there are forces at work today, that we do not fully understand ...... |
blu...a quick look at 1974 - 2014 corn
