Reading the Weather that Never Falls from the Sky
A coffee-farming family in the mountains of Honduras has probably never heard of the Chicago exchange. Even so, what their harvest is worth and what their fertilizer costs are decided, to a considerable extent, over there, somewhere between the grain benchmark, the dollar and the oil curve. Those forces arrive at the farm gate unannounced.
- food prices
- Markets
- Agricultural Innovation
Reading the Weather that Never Falls from the Sky
A coffee-farming family in the mountains of Honduras has probably never heard of the Chicago exchange. Even so, what their harvest is worth and what their fertilizer costs are decided, to a considerable extent, over there, somewhere between the grain benchmark, the dollar and the oil curve. Those forces arrive at the farm gate unannounced.
With that idea turning over in my mind, I spent two days this August in Denver at the annual research symposium of the J.P. Morgan Center for Commodities at the University of Colorado Denver, which brought together economists, materials scientists, exchange officials and traders of wheat and oil. I went to present an early-warning barometer for agricultural markets, expecting to hear about matters far removed from our day-to-day questions, and I returned convinced of the opposite, for that room spoke of agriculture the whole time, even though hardly anyone called it by its name.