Posted on 01/10/2008 4:44:42 PM PST by DeaconBenjamin
Wheat has become such a hot commodity that it has been stolen by the truckload in western Kansas.
Morning Edition, January 10, 2008 · Across the Midwest, farmers are benefiting from the recent run-up in commodity prices.
The price of corn has doubled in the last year. Soybeans are up more than 50 percent, and wheat is trading at three times what it was two years ago.
But this boom has also brought problems to the prairie.
In western Kansas police are investigating almost a dozen incidents where thieves using tractor trailers stole wheat from grain elevators.
The thieves hit at least four grain elevators near the western Kansas town of Syracuse and made off with more than $50,000 worth of raw wheat.
Lucrative Crime
Terry Bertholf, attorney for insurer Kansas Farmers Service Association, said wheat elevators are often unmanned at this time of year. He said the thieves knew how to operate the augers to offload the grain, and then they drove the wheat to other grain elevators in the area and resold it.
"We don't even know for sure that the $50,000 is all that was taken," he said. "We may never know."
Bertholf said large-scale wheat thefts like the ones being investigated now are unheard of in western Kansas. In the past, there were occasionally problems with someone stealing a few bushels, but it never involved using tractor trailer rigs, he said.
Now, with a tractor trailer load of wheat fetching as much as $5,000, this crime is far more lucrative. Just last year wheat was selling at $3 a bushel, but now it's selling at $10 a bushel and is harder to come by.
"Most of the grain has been milled into bread, which is part of the reason the price is so high. Plus, less wheat is being produced because acres are being diverted to corn for ethanol and livestock," Bertholf said.
Security Lags
When prices for any commodity rise rapidly, whether it's wheat or scrap metal, security measures often lag behind.
Danielle Rau, with the California Farm Bureau Federation, said the same thing happened in her state when almond prices hit a record high.
"Last year, we had a huge problem — when the price of almonds was as high as it was — of thieves coming in and stealing entire tractor trailer loads of almonds totaling $250,000 a piece, and these guys were stealing them right out of the yard," Rau said.
Investigators discovered that the thieves were trucking the nuts to Canada and selling them.
Police still haven't made any arrests in the wheat thefts and are urging grain elevator operators to step up security measures at the hundreds of silos that dot this part of the Great Plains.
This is why I always tell farmers that they need to hire one of those guys from the mall, who writes on rice, to mark each and every grain with their initials.
Oh for the days when you could bribe a couple of warehouse guys and make off with $50K of DRAMs in a box under your arm on your lunch break.
Wow! I guess we can’t open the window and let the home-made bread cool on the window sill anymore.
Didn’t they hang bread thieves back in 17th century England? Or as Marie Antionette said: Let them eat Wonder Bread and Skippy peanut butter.
Name two.
Name two, forsooth. Hah!
Yea, and you malthusians think that ethanol is to blame for the increase in wheat prices.
The drought in Australia, the export restrictions of the Ukraine and Russia — those things? Bah, they have nothing to do with the price of wheat.
It’s all ethanol’s fault.
You have got to be kidding me.
I have had bitter arguments here with many people who simply do not understand or accept the principle of a market economy.
Too much public education perhaps. - Look at this post to me: - Malthusian BS??
To: bill1952
We don’t plant all the arable land in the US now, so your concern is invalid with respect to a rise in the price of food. We pay farmers now not to plant crops.
Further, non-food crops will end up making biofuels - they are more efficient (e.g. switchgrass). Stop the Malthusian BS, it just isn’t going to work out like that.
25 posted on 12/24/2007 12:45:32 PM PST by RKV (He who has the guns makes the rules)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1943902/posts
Thats just one of many, and if you want more, you go searching through my post history to find them.
I read a lot of ethanol threads.
I’ve never read a post from anyone who said that ethanol production doesn’t affect food prices, but I’ve read a lot of posts that say they do.
Name two
>Yea, and you malthusians think that ethanol is to blame for the increase in wheat prices.
LOL! That didn’t take long, now did it B Eagle?
There are two for you!
LOL! NVDave? - Priceless!
I stand corrected.
I do read a lot of ethanol threads, guess I just never see the ones about ‘ will not affect prices’. Guess it’s so stupid that it doesn’t even register with me.
They’re wrong, as you’ve pointed out.
Can we win this war if we continue to indulge ourselves in the ethanol boondoggle, which will not begin to give us energy independence but will have many harmful unintended consequences.
Heh.
Thank you for the post, sir. - Bill
You know, just about every “pro-ethanol” grain farmer whom I’ve ever spoken with knew exactly that prices would rise and that was the whole point of being “pro”. After receiving virtually the same price for their product for the past 70 years they are feeling they are due. It is good business practice to enlarge your markets; yes?
The incessant “ethanol is responsible for the price increase of X” where “X” is every other ag commodity other than corn are both stupid and wrong. Stupid, because repeating this mantra won’t make it any more true than repeating “The world is flat” will make the planet into a pancake, and wrong because these ethanol malthusians ignore the reality of the world commodity markets, starting with their cyclical nature.
Here’s the facts: I’m a farmer. I’ve benefited from the recent increase in ag commodity prices (in my case, hay), but I know that a) it isn’t due to the price of corn going up and b) that it won’t last. Commodity price increases almost never do.
Ag commodity prices, like all commodity prices, run in long, multi-decade cycles, just like gold, oil, coal, silver, etc.
We’re in a worldwide commodity up-cycle right now. The bottom of the last ag commodity cycle was 1986. As any farmer about 1986: that was the year that broke farmers and ranchers from coast to coast, as commodity prices bottomed out from massive over-production coming out of the previous commodity boom cycle in the 70’s.
The next thing these neo-malthusians will be claiming is “ethanol is responsible for the price increase in gold.” Since gold has been going up at the same time as corn, wheat, beans, hay, etc — you’d have every bit as much evidence as you have to claim that wheat is being influenced by corn prices. Go ahead - put a graph of gold prices next to corn prices. Wow, what a coincidence! They’re correlated!
That must mean that corn is causing the increase in gold prices, yes?
Obviously not. Anyone familiar with statistics will say “Correlation does not equal causation.”
The real cause of the spike in wheat prices is this:
1. A drought in Australia caused an estimated 20%+ drop in Australian wheat harvest levels.
2. The Ukraine also had a severe drought - affecting over 60% of the Ukraine’s wheat acreage. The government there put restrictions on wheat exports to prevent cost increases in their bread production, effectively taking the rest of their crop off the world market.
This was the event, BTW, that caused the wheat market to take off, not ethanol. If US ethanol production were the cause of the recent price increase in wheat, the markets would have pushed the price of wheat to these levels based only on the planting intention reports from the USDA last March, not the harvest projections from the US, Canada, Ukraine and Russia.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aQ6CJPPIzi94&refer=home
Russia also increased the export tariff on wheat this past October.
3. Last issue is the increase in global consumption, driven by strong demand(s) from China and India. Want to see yet another ag commodity going up in price, purely because of Chinese demand?
Wool:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602013&sid=aoDIjVio_OAU&refer=commodity_futures
You can’t blame that on ethanol either, because the sheep industry in the US is basically dead. It was killed by the Australians and the removal of US subsidies for wool and mohair. Wool prices are up pretty nicely this year, after having been in the dumpster for more than 10 years here in Nevada. Thanks to our trade and current account deficits, the Chinese have huge wads of dollars with which to buy ag commodities (as well as oil, coal, etc) on the world markets that they didn’t have previously.
Ethanol has an localized effect on corn prices, but this idiotic chanting that ethanol is responsible for all ag commodity price increases is (again) both stupid and wrong.
Ok.. Somebody post a picture of the Tony Soprano crew in overalls and a straw hats...
A very nice summary, btw, quite useful if one needs a bit of a laugh.
FReegards!
Excuse me. Perhaps I’m thick, but what does a generalised price rise have to do with ‘’enlarging your markets’’?
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