Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | Tara made a not so veiled insinuation above and I have no idea whether it is true but it is interesting to speculate . I will be more explicit. The numbers that go into the stocks reports are voluntarily reported by the various grain companies and producers. First, producers would have no reason to over report, in fact their incentive would be to under-report. A list of the major grain handlers from Iowa State is reprinted below. If you were a major grain buyer and you knew that by inflating your grain stocks or mis-report old & new stocks you could lower the price, make a great deal of money and nobody could ever check you would have a very powerful motivation to do so. Especially if you had been paying record prices for the past year.
Table 20. Largest U.S. Grain Storage Firms
Name Barge Loadout(bushels) % ofTotal Ship Loadout(bushels) % ofTotal Storage(bushels) % ofTotal
Other 6,279,000 26.55 4,206,666 20.32 5,090,191,808 71.54
Cargill Incorporated 2,999,000 12.68 6,924,000 33.44 439,868,644 6.18
Archer Daniels Midland 4,285,000 18.12 3,160,000 15.26 412,398,225 5.80
Conagra Incorporated 462,000 1.95 1,380,000 6.66 181,332,000 2.55
Bunge Corporation 3,875,000 16.38 800,000 3.86 158,567,000 2.23
Continental Grain Company 1,974,000 8.35 2,690,000 12.99 155,402,327 2.18
Cenex Harvest States Coop 1,040,000 4.40 655,000 3.16 133,386,000 1.87
Farmland Industries 0 0.00 0 0.00 118,819,000 1.67
Riceland Foods Incorporated 220,000 0.93 0 0.00 98,201,000 1.38
The Andersons Incorporated 0 0.00 0 0.00 78,547,389 1.10
General Mills Corporation 0 0.00 640,000 3.09 65,793,000 0.92
Consolidated Grain & Barge 2,275,000 9.62 0 0.00 57,241,950 0.80
Central Soya 0 0.00 0 0.00 52,013,000 0.73
The Scoular Company 0 0.00 0 0.00 30,061,073 0.42
MFA Incorporated 40,000 0.17 0 0.00 25,168,538 0.35
Topflight Grain Cooperative 0 0.00 0 0.00 13,920,000 0.20
Louis Dreyfus 205,000 0.87 250,000 1.21 4,668,000 0.07
Total 23,654,000 20,705,666 7,115,578,954
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Smoking gun on the lost it found it corn stocks number.
