Why U.S. Growers Are Betting The Farm On Soybeans Amid China Trade War

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

15 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Maybe so, but Trudeau would love it if those Tesla machines were being built in a certain to-be-empty plant in Oshawa.  Or that empty plant in Ingersoll.  Or that plant in St. Catharines.  Or the empty plants in Windsor. Or that one in Brampton.  Or the one in Laval.  Or ...... well, you get the idea.  

Canada will soon be out of the auto-building business. All gone. Now:  who to blame?

Our lack of competitiveness.  

You guys lost a whole city - Detroit

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

14 minutes ago, Enthalpic said:

Our lack of competitiveness.  

But the Canadian dollar is trading at a 30% discount.  30%!  That is huge!  And Canada cannot run an auto assembly plant with a 30% extra gift, compliments of the exchange rate, and make money? What is wrong with that picture?  [I already know; it is a rhetorical question.] 

When I ran my plants in Canada, I only had a currency benefit of 7% to 11%.  I leveraged that exchange difference into huge sales, and made myself a small fortune.  When you have a currency differential, when you sell over the Border, you get this premium of an extra 30% on your invoice compared to what you get domestically.  If you cannot make money at 30%, what on earth is being done wrong?

This is the structural problem with Canada.  You folks have elected loonies into your Governments, and the loonies have wrecked your industry.  Southern Ontario is now littered with these empty manufacturing plants, just standing there, no buyers. What amazes me is that it just does not sink in.  If you declare war on your manufacturing sector. what are you going to do: rely on the vagaries of selling nickel from Sudbury? Smelting aluminum in Quebec on the Saguenay?  Boiling the tar sands oil in Alberta?  How is that working out for you, as a national wealth-generating machine?  Oh, I have it:  running those tourist trains up to Hudson Bay, on that rickety railroad at 20 mph, so the Americans can gawk at the polar bears.  Selling paper from that pulp mill in Port Hawkesbury, N.S.  Smuggling booze from St. Pierre? And you have added over ten million people, immigrants, in the last thirty years.  Not much of the vision thing there, now is there?  

Edited March 18, 2019 by Jan van Eck

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

12 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

But the Canadian dollar is trading at a 30% discount.  30%!  That is huge!  And Canada cannot run an auto assembly plant with a 30% extra gift, compliments of the exchange rate, and make money? What is wrong with that picture?  [I already know; it is a rhetorical question.] 

When I ran my plants in Canada, I only had a currency benefit of 7% to 11%.  I leveraged that exchange difference into huge sales, and made myself a small fortune.  When you have a currency differential, when you sell over the Border, you get this premium of an extra 30% on your invoice compared to what you get domestically.  If you cannot make money at 30%, what on earth is being done wrong?

This is the structural problem with Canada.  You folks have elected loonies into your Governments, and the loonies have wrecked your industry.  Southern Ontario is now littered with these empty manufacturing plants, just standing there, no buyers. What amazes me is that it just does not sink in.  If you declare war on your manufacturing sector. what are you going to do: rely on the vagaries of selling nickel from Sudbury? Smelting aluminum in Quebec on the Saguenay?  Boiling the tar sands oil in Alberta?  How is that working out for you, as a national wealth-generating machine?  Oh, I have it:  running those tourist trains up to Hudson Bay, on that rickety railroad at 20 mph, so the Americans can gawk at the polar bears.  Selling paper from that pulp mill in Port Hawkesbury, N.S.  Smuggling booze from St. Pierre? And you have added over ten million people, immigrants, in the last thirty years.  Not much of the vision thing there, now is there?  

I'll take a loonie over your outright lunatic any day. 

We have bailed out the manufacturing sector plenty of times.  You can't say we don't support them... a lot of votes depend on it.  What would you suggest we do - and how is that working out for you guys?  Trillion dollar deficits is not wealth generation...

We don't fear immigrants nearly as much as you do - someone has to staff all of our Tim Hortons.

Oh you forgot to mention our most popular new industry, Cannabis. We will fill the empty plants with plants.

Edited March 18, 2019 by Enthalpic

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 hour ago, Enthalpic said:

I'll take a loonie over your outright lunatic any day. 

We have bailed out the manufacturing sector plenty of times.  You can't say we don't support them... a lot of votes depend on it.  What would you suggest we do - and how is that working out for you guys?  Trillion dollar deficits is not wealth generation...

We don't fear immigrants nearly as much as you do - someone has to staff all of our Tim Hortons.

Oh you forgot to mention our most popular new industry, Cannabis. We will fill the empty plants with plants.

I shall take that as an exemplar of the wry Canadian sense of humor!   

As to the manufacturing sector, yes the large employers get "bailed out," specifically Bombardier and their transit railcars and their aircraft.  But here is the problem: the more prosaic stuff gets ignored.   Example:  in Southwestern Ontario the Campbell Soup Company had a huge tomato processing plant, to manufacture - you guessed it - Tomato Soup.  It could not handle the electric bills after the loonies in the Ontario Government put the price of electricity through the roof.  This is what happens when uninformed people go off on some mantra to save the planet, shut down their nuke plants, and spend billions on wind machines.  Then they have to go build gigantic new natural-gas machines to be on stand-by to keep it all together.  In a low-margin, high-volume product like soup, who can handle the hit?  Nobody can.  So the plant closes, and another several hundred hit the Pogey Lines, a further drain on the coffers of the State.  [Pogey is Canadian slang for unemployment insurance payments from the State, basically a form of welfare.  In Britain they call that "on the dole".]

The Province of Ontario has labor laws that allow for the Minister to hammer a union contract down the throats of both labor and management, if it comes to that.  OK, so when Caterpillar buys Electro-Motive Diesel, and there is this confrontation with the union, does the Ministry of labour step in?  Nope, they leave it to strikes and lockouts.  Cat is in a sales disadvantage to GE, which has a new Diesel developed that is less costly to run than the EMD version.  I am no fan of CAT management, but still, with the atmosphere that developed, CAT ended up closing down that plant in London, and remember that that plant produced some 50% of all railroad locomotives for North America.  The plant sits empty, the machinery all gone, and the workers are history.  If your Province has become unprofitable, don't be surprised the manufacturers pack up and leave. 

Ontario at one time had a thriving plastics manufacturing and plastics conversion industry. There were styrene manufacturers in Cambridge, and olefin manufacturers, and even several large builders of machinery, Husky Systems and Engel Canada  (which set up their plant for North America in Guelph).  That Engel plant got closed down, and now Engel (Austria) builds their machines in York, Pennsylvania.  Bye-bye several hundred jobs, all high-tech, high-paid industrial manufacturing. And the reason is that those plants had customers who bought the machines to convert the raw materials into finished products, but those machines all run on electric power.  If your power is from nuke plants and Niagara Falls then it is cheap.  If you start using taxpayer and ratepayer money to go build fantasy machines to harvest the wind, producing intermittent and variable, unstable power, then the cost of that electricity shoots up and the converters go out of business, they cannot compete with a plant sitting in Tennessee running on TVA power.  The people in Queens Park do not understand this, they would rather go on a crusade over "saving the planet."   OK, so they get medals for their religious purity, but at the expense of the industrial base. 

For readers outside Canada, "Tim Horton's" is a well-known doughnut and coffee chain of stores.  Tim Horton himself was a famous hockey player, back in the day. 

Now, as to your suggestion, admittedly as wry humor, to convert the empty factories into marijuana grow operations, that is likely not that far from the mark.  It will be expensive to do, the problem being the high ceilings and lack of insulation on cinder-block wall construction causing problems with maintaining heat.   You could build internal mezzanine floors to solve that issue, but expensive.  I rather suspect the more logical recycle of those buildings would be to grow mushrooms; just leave the lights off and they grow just fine.  The lights are all off anyway. 

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

21 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Now, as to your suggestion, admittedly as wry humor, to convert the empty factories into marijuana grow operations, that is likely not that far from the mark.  It will be expensive to do, the problem being the high ceilings and lack of insulation on cinder-block wall construction causing problems with maintaining heat.

Raising Mary Jane takes a lot of electricity and water as well, I heard from a friend.  Mushrooms and Campbell's soup; sounds like a winner.  But they'll still need to package all that lovely mushroom soup!

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

12 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

I shall take that as an exemplar of the wry Canadian sense of humor!   

As to the manufacturing sector, yes the large employers get "bailed out," specifically Bombardier and their transit railcars and their aircraft.  But here is the problem: the more prosaic stuff gets ignored.   Example:  in Southwestern Ontario the Campbell Soup Company had a huge tomato processing plant, to manufacture - you guessed it - Tomato Soup.  It could not handle the electric bills after the loonies in the Ontario Government put the price of electricity through the roof.  This is what happens when uninformed people go off on some mantra to save the planet, shut down their nuke plants, and spend billions on wind machines.  Then they have to go build gigantic new natural-gas machines to be on stand-by to keep it all together.  In a low-margin, high-volume product like soup, who can handle the hit?  Nobody can.  So the plant closes, and another several hundred hit the Pogey Lines, a further drain on the coffers of the State.  [Pogey is Canadian slang for unemployment insurance payments from the State, basically a form of welfare.  In Britain they call that "on the dole".]

The Province of Ontario has labor laws that allow for the Minister to hammer a union contract down the throats of both labor and management, if it comes to that.  OK, so when Caterpillar buys Electro-Motive Diesel, and there is this confrontation with the union, does the Ministry of labour step in?  Nope, they leave it to strikes and lockouts.  Cat is in a sales disadvantage to GE, which has a new Diesel developed that is less costly to run than the EMD version.  I am no fan of CAT management, but still, with the atmosphere that developed, CAT ended up closing down that plant in London, and remember that that plant produced some 50% of all railroad locomotives for North America.  The plant sits empty, the machinery all gone, and the workers are history.  If your Province has become unprofitable, don't be surprised the manufacturers pack up and leave. 

Ontario at one time had a thriving plastics manufacturing and plastics conversion industry. There were styrene manufacturers in Cambridge, and olefin manufacturers, and even several large builders of machinery, Husky Systems and Engel Canada  (which set up their plant for North America in Guelph).  That Engel plant got closed down, and now Engel (Austria) builds their machines in York, Pennsylvania.  Bye-bye several hundred jobs, all high-tech, high-paid industrial manufacturing. And the reason is that those plants had customers who bought the machines to convert the raw materials into finished products, but those machines all run on electric power.  If your power is from nuke plants and Niagara Falls then it is cheap.  If you start using taxpayer and ratepayer money to go build fantasy machines to harvest the wind, producing intermittent and variable, unstable power, then the cost of that electricity shoots up and the converters go out of business, they cannot compete with a plant sitting in Tennessee running on TVA power.  The people in Queens Park do not understand this, they would rather go on a crusade over "saving the planet."   OK, so they get medals for their religious purity, but at the expense of the industrial base. 

For readers outside Canada, "Tim Horton's" is a well-known doughnut and coffee chain of stores.  Tim Horton himself was a famous hockey player, back in the day. 

Now, as to your suggestion, admittedly as wry humor, to convert the empty factories into marijuana grow operations, that is likely not that far from the mark.  It will be expensive to do, the problem being the high ceilings and lack of insulation on cinder-block wall construction causing problems with maintaining heat.   You could build internal mezzanine floors to solve that issue, but expensive.  I rather suspect the more logical recycle of those buildings would be to grow mushrooms; just leave the lights off and they grow just fine.  The lights are all off anyway. 

I'm glad you recognized the humor.  Comedians are one of our biggest exports - unfortunately once they get to LA they never come back; although the Vancouver film industry is gaining ground.

Most of those problems are Ontario specific and now they are stuck with Doug Ford (Trump light). Guess we will see if anything improves... his brother Rob was a crack smoking embarrassment.

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

Just now, Dan Warnick said:

Raising Mary Jane takes a lot of electricity and water as well, I heard from a friend.  Mushrooms and Campbell's soup; sounds like a winner.  But they'll still need to package all that lovely mushroom soup!

Weed takes a lot of packaging, testing and oil extraction.  They can also make edibles.

Aurora Cannabis is Alberta based, the greenhouses are huge!

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 minute ago, Enthalpic said:

I'm glad you recognized the humor.  Comedians are one of our biggest exports - unfortunately once they get to LA they never come back; although the Vancouver film industry is gaining ground.

Most of those problems are Ontario specific and now they are stuck with Doug Ford (Trump light). Guess we will see if anything improves... his brother Rob was a crack smoking embarrassment.

But remember that the people of Ontario voted for the buffoon out of disgust with what Miss Wynne had wrought.  Her economic destruction was total, and far-reaching.  Under the Wynne Regime the cost of electricity for a pensioner in the Lake Country, living in a 600-ft shack with no air conditioning, he pays $800 a month!  With that track record, who needs Kathleen?  

Yet you have the same problems on the Federal Level.  Look at Manitoba, with its agricultural base getting hurt due to the Feds not forcing the rail companies to haul grain to market; the RRs left that grain in vast piles, the elevators full, and sat on their hands, hauling oil instead.  Manitoba is now a beggar Province, with no money and receiving "equalization payments" from the only two Provinces still generating some cash, Alberta and BC.  When the Hudson Bay RR got flooded out, and that American outfit that had bought it basically abandoned it  (and why the Liberals sold it to the Americans in the first place leaves me baffled),the Liberals did nothing, basically abandoning Port Churchill to their fate.  What kind of Government is that?  Useless. 

Incidentally there are perhaps 25 million Canadians living in the USA.  A lot have no "papers."  They slip under the radar as they speak the same North-American English and have similar educations, there are no characteristic physical differences, and in the final analysis nobody cares about it.  Ironically, many more than the "Mexicans" that everybody gets so exercised about.  Cheers. 

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

4 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Under the Wynne Regime the cost of electricity for a pensioner in the Lake Country, living in a 600-ft shack with no air conditioning, he pays $800 a month! 

I find that hard to believe; I've never paid more than $75 for a month of power and I run my air conditioner on high in the summer and never turn off my computer (in AB).

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

7 hours ago, Enthalpic said:

I find that hard to believe; I've never paid more than $75 for a month of power and I run my air conditioner on high in the summer and never turn off my computer (in AB).

The foundation for the tossing of the Ontario Liberal Party in the last election, from an absolute majority, I think it was 124 seats, to five seats, completely demolishing the Party overnight,was - yup, it was the electricity debacle.  What drove the price up through the roof was the adding of "stranded costs" onto the bills of rural users.  Where you have few users/buyers, up in the lake country, and huge stranded costs to go collect, the result is a massive increase in the charges to each connected user.  If you find it "hard to believe," I would suggest you look up the large number of articles published in The Sun, printed in Toronto, that has extensively covered this issue.  OK, the Sun is a tabloid, a rag sheet, but nobody disputes the truth: that users in the dispersed areas of the Province are hosed to oblivion.  Check it out. 

As for you folks in Alberta, yup, you run electric heating cables under your driveways so that you don't have to shovel snow and contend with ice.  Must be nice!  (One of the fellows posting here admitted to that.)

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

9 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

 

As for you folks in Alberta, yup, you run electric heating cables under your driveways so that you don't have to shovel snow and contend with ice.  Must be nice!  (One of the fellows posting here admitted to that.)

It's just my driveway -and it's heated with glycol lines from a natural gas boiler.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

5 minutes ago, Enthalpic said:

It's just my driveway -and it's heated with glycol lines from a natural gas boiler.

Totally shameless!    I go out there and swing away, chopping up the ice block by block and shoveling it off the driveway.  It is brutal work.  My family calls me "Pickaxe Pierre," in honor of being next door to (French-speaking) Canada, that land of seriously tough guys who brazen their way through Winter with snowshoes and two-man broadsaws.  

(Definitely gotta get me one of those boilers....)