Philip Shaw

Do you feel duped?  Or do you just feel a little stupid?  If you don’t know what I am referring to you must’ve missed the June 30th USDA planted acreage report as well as the quarterly stocks report that came out the same day.  With the USDA lowering 2010 corn acreage and reducing quarterly stock…

Next week we will be finding out the actual planted acreage of crops that American farmers have growing in the field.  There’s been a lot of conjecture over the last few weeks about crop ratings as farmers position their hedges against what they feel is in the field.  With much of the Corn Belt experiencing…

One constant our American friends verbalize when describing our land is referring to it as “Canada.”   For instance if you are in Michigan, a stone’s throw away from Ontario, you’ll still hear Americans talk about “Canada.”   Very rarely do you our American friends talk about Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta or British Columbia.  Canadians, I…

This morning my twitter feed had one analyst saying that corn was going to go up $.20 on the open.  There was much optimism this morning as the USDA caught everybody leaning a little bit the wrong way.  The USDA actually cut corn-ending stocks for all crop down to 1.63 billion bushels from 1.738 bu…

I had a fellow asked me this week my opinion about corn prices and how the Gulf oil spill might affect them.  I don’t know but you could surmise by that question that he had more corn to sell and was looking for some type of late spring early summer Hail Mary pass in the…

It has been a very busy week in southwestern Ontario soybean country.  In fact I think you can say ditto for the great North American soybean belt. My neighborhood is full of people racing to get those soybeans in. I had my best soybean-planting day of my career today.  At the end of the day…

It has been quite a day.  Tonight as I write this Asian markets are down on news that we had the largest drop in the Dow Jones this year at -376.36 points.  It would seem that the European flu is spreading with many analysts thinking that the American economy cannot withstand the possible sovereign debt…

It is wet in southwestern Ontario and in a perverse sort of way that is a good thing.  The reason being if it wasn’t wet in southwestern Ontario I might be out tearing up my corn crop, which I planted three weeks ago.  The Mother’s Day frost burned about 90% of the corn in Ontario…

It is not often I can say that I’m writing on a Thursday night when the Dow Jones has plummeted almost 1000 points in a day, the worst crash since 1987.  Is a little jittery out there?  I think so.  Mix a little bit of Greece into your agricultural economics had the Canadian dollar going…

Last week it was confirmed that I have glyphosate resistant Giant Ragweed growing on my farm.  I believe there will be many more occurrences of this throughout southwestern Ontario this year and next.  I believe but I’m not sure that my glyphosate resistant Giant Ragweed problem is the second such known problem in Ontario.  However,…