Farm Credit Canada hosts Ag Outlook 2015: Part I

Feb 24, 2015

Focus on weather and markets

More than 100 farmers and other agriculture professionals filled the Bingemans Conference Centre in Kitchener, Ontario on Monday to take in the Ag Outlook 2015, hosted by Farm Credit Canada.

The show featured four predominant topics that are important for farmers to understand so they can prepare themselves not only for the upcoming planting season but also to be able to have an idea of what the future holds.

The topics were the economy, agricultural markets, weather, and farm management. Here, we will focus on the agricultural markets and weather.

Drew Lerner, President of World Weather Inc. out of Shawnee Mission, Kansas, spoke about weather trends and said after using information from Environment Canada, “it turns out this winter that we’ve had so far is actually one of the driest on record,” despite all the snow and moisture on the ground.

Lerner also mentioned what he calls the “18 year cycle”, which he uses to give farmers a general idea of the kind of weather to expect. He noted weather patterns from 1961, 1979 and 1997 and discussed their similarities to the current weather.

When the time came to talk about commodities and risk management, John DePutter, President of DePutter Publishing took the stage.

DePutter talked about the ongoing “global love affair” with soybeans.

“Eventually, the world is going to overproduce,” DePutter said, suggesting that when it happens, farmers will be happy to have corn and wheat in their crop mix.

DePutter spoke about the impacts the commodity markets have on one another.

“Agriculture is a history of swings from good times in grains and tough times in livestock to the reverse,” he said, noting high grains and expensive feed forced livestock producers to cut their herd numbers, and that a downturn in grain prices mean an upturn in meat production.

Stay tuned for the second part of the event coverage and don’t forget to engage in discussion. How do you go about risk management? Did you attend the Ag Outlook 2015 and what did you take away from it?

Drew Lerner

John DePutter

Video: LALEXPERT: Sclerotinia cycle and prophylactic methods

White rot, also known as sclerotinia, is a common agricultural fungal disease caused by various virulent species of Sclerotinia. It initially affects the root system (mycelium) before spreading to the aerial parts through the dissemination of spores.

Sclerotinia is undoubtedly a disease of major economic importance, and very damaging in the event of a heavy attack.

All these attacks come from the primary inoculum stored in the soil: sclerotia. These forms of resistance can survive in the soil for over 10 years, maintaining constant contamination of susceptible host crops, causing symptoms on the crop and replenishing the soil inoculum with new sclerotia.