The Rural Voice, 1993-11, Page 16Robert Mercer
Getting hitched to the satellite
This past month I signed up for
another source of market information.
I have had one satellite feed for about
10 years to a printout of commodity
news and prices, spiced up with
weather, world and financial
highlights.
This second dish sitting on our
west -end, flat roof brings in a constant
stream of price and market update
news and opinion. It's very U.S. ori-
ented and an excellent source of wea-
ther information. There's a satellite
picture of North America with the
cloud cover, or more detailed regional
weather coverage. Once we got the
dish lined up, over the oak trees, the
signal came in loud and clear. There's
even a voice mode with some of the
pages of information. You get the
daily grain and livestock updates from
OMAF as part of the service, but other
more specific advice services are on
an additional cost basis. The cost is a
bit of a problem as it's billed in U.S.
dollars. Thus it keeps getting more
expensive as our dollar falls.
As with all news in this informa-
tion age, there is just too much. It will
take about a month to sort out what is
useful and what is a waste of time. I
can pull up prices on cotton, rice or
sorghum, and
cash prices for
livestock at
markets I've
never heard of.
With time a more
limiting factor
than information,
this new "toy"_
will need daily
discipline to
monitor and
extract worth-
while facts
without suc-
cumbing to the
information
overload syndrome.
Satellite information systems are
the route of the future, just like cable
TV in the cities. This particular
commodity network claims in excess
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12 THE RURAL VOICE
of 58,000 users in North America and
there are others with other specialties.
Even Pioneer Hi -Bred has a service
"Farm-Dayta" which can often be
seen at their booths in farm shows and
on special trade days.
With practice and some special
individual "programming", hitting the
right keys gets easier and less time
consuming. Many of the pages of
information are sponsored by
companies and there is daily comment
from the trading floor by voice from
digital reproduced sound. One of the
recent sections was a form of photo
essay — in colour on my screen — of
frost and water damage across parts of
the U.S. Good photos with comment
on extent of damage as well as actual
shots of shorter corn cobs with
unfilled heads. Charts, bar graphs and
trendlines — they're all there to amuse,
confuse or educate.
Satellite information is only as
good as the use to which you put it.
We'll give this thing a month's trial.
If it's a help, we'll keep it. If it's a
hindrance — out it goes. The
shortcomings are in carrying Canadian
market news. Nothing from the
Canadian Wheat Board. It would be
greatly improved with information
from CanFax of the Canadian
Cattlemen's Association, and statistics
from the Canadian Grain Commission.
There is, however, a western Canadian
package which gives much of this, but
not on the general service in Ontario.
The service is just too American. It's
difficult to find news from Brazil, the
former Soviet Union, Australia or
even Europe and the GATT. Maybe
it's just that I haven't found those
pages, but I don't think so.
It is just one of those shortcom-
ings of our friends to the south, that if
it doesn't happen in the U.S. of A.,
then it doesn't happen. Unfortunate-
ly from my perspective the world of
agriculture is larger and often even
more interesting in the off -shore
markets, but I do recognize that
Ontario prices reflect Chicago and the
U.S. mid -west weather.0
Robert Mercer is editor of the
Broadwater Market Letter, a weekly
commodity and policy advisory letter
from Goodwood, Ontario LOC IAO.