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| If you're well fed you have lots of problems. If you're hungry you have just one really big problem. The leaders in china wake up every morning thinking about where they're going to get the food to feed all of the people.
13 years ago when we ran up the price because of china buying all of the pundits were saying that. But most of the 12 years that followed there were surpluses and there will be surpluses again soon.
That's one of the core functions of the USDA, to take an accurate inventory of grain and to track exports, production and usage to allow the market to reward growers for growing certain crops BEFORE there are shortages.
Around here a lot of that low test weight corn that was plowed under last summer would have been mighty useful right now. Instead with discounts and low prices a lot of farmers did the math and found out it wasn't worth harvesting. What a waste. Also the large prevent plant numbers past two years would have been half or less of what they were if there were good prices on the board. Farmers would have found a way to get the crop in late. Prevent plant sort of gets treated as a voluntary set aside in a wet year that also happens to have low prices. More waste. And a lot of the policy surrounding conservation compliance reduces acres and increases prevent plant acres, but maybe adds a couple ducks to shoot. There might come a day when the people would rather have the food instead of a few more ducks. | |
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It's not about price.
