Rick Browne, CHS senior vice-president for grain marketing, had an interesting presentation at the Prairie Grains Conference in Grand Forks last week. It was about the end of the "gold rush" in grain. Browne, who has more than 30 years of experience in the grain marketing with CHS, doesn't buy the idea that we've reached a new plateau in grain prices, or that the world's population growth is going to keep grain prices this high forever. The grain market has always been, and probably always…

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  Interesting report in the left-leaning Harper’s Magazine called the "The Food Bubble." It’s about the 2008 run-up in wheat prices.   The article is subtitled "How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it." As author Frederick Kaufman tells it, Goldman Sachs was at the heart of the crisis. It created a commodity index fund and figured out a bunch of tricks like they did in the mortgage market to make money without taking any risk. Basically, brokers were…

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The weather across the Dakotas has been so nice lately that I’ve been waiting for it to change. So when the volcano in Iceland erupted, I thought, “Here we go --the ash cloud will eventually get around the globe and block out sunlight, giving us another cool summer, the third one in a row.” So I emailed Dennis Todey and Adrian Akyuz, climatologists for North Dakota and South Dakota, and Frank Watson, Dakota’s Farmer’s weather columnist, and asked them what they thought might happen. And…

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Climate change was on Jeff Enger’s mind when I caught up with him in the field recently.   He was super coultering around potholes in a corn field, trying to stay ahead his brother and nephew who were planting soybeans at a feverish pace. The calendar said June and some of fields around Marion were just getting dry enough to plant.   Enger represents North Dakota corn growers on a national cap and trade committee.   Cap and trade is a government idea that would limit carbon emissions from…

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