Cotton it the commodity I follow and the price in Australia and the price in
Lubbock, Texas are with in pennies per pound of each other when you correct
for grade, freight and exchange rate. Wheat is much the same when you
compare apples to apples. Hard Red Winter wheat that tests 62#/ bushels and
14% protein will vary only by drayage and about 10% on local conditions.
That is true inside the US as well as outside it.

Most of our export subsides come in the form of loans to buy the stuff. A
sneaky way around the WTO rules.

First Torsten roasts us for supporting the price and then for not supporting
it enough. He can't have it both ways. The only time the goverment gets in
the price setting business of farm crops are when they fall to a certain
level the goverment takes the crops as collateral against a non recourse
loan. If the price goes up enough the farmer can buy the crop back and pay
storage on it or let the government take it to cover the loan.

For accounting it can be considered a sale or a loan. Historically
considering it a sale is the most likely thing to happen because the market
does not usually recover as fast as storage and interest eats it up.

Mad Cow Disease has sent our cattle markets up a good deal. I can imagine
what it is doing to Canada who dumps 1,000,000 head of feeders on us every
year and a half million tons of meat. We had a bay over supply of cattle but
that should be taken care of pretty quick with Canada cut off.

Gordon
"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...

"Torsten Brinch" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 22:46:33 -0500, "Gordon Couger"
wrote:

Selling for world market price.

the world market price for food is a very iffy concept anyway. Such a
small
proportion of crop grown is traded across frontiers that it doesn't take
much to drive a market haywire

Jim Webster