Philip Shaw

I’ve had a difficult time with wheat this year.  I managed to get my wheat planted in the late fall of 2009.  That’s always a good thing because my heavy clay soils require it for rotation setting me up for corn and soybeans.  While some of my neighbors were harvesting their wheat last week, I…

It is the night before USDA releases another WASDE supply and demand report for July.  Sometimes deadlines aren’t convenient and this is surely one of those times.  As the June 30 USDA planted acreage report was a bullish surprise, tomorrow’s stocks report may be the second shoe to drop.  It almost seems we’re at a…

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…