Want to know the cash price for No. 1 Yellow Peas in Manitoba in 1990?
John Duvenaud can help. The publisher of the market newsletter Wild Oats and veteran market reporter has compiled a data base of weekly western Canadian cash grain, oilseed and special crop prices going back 25 years and has daily cash prices starting in 2005. The data is available, for a fee, through canadagrain.com.
“We think it will be especially useful for academic and business researchers,” Duvenaud said in an interview last week.
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Duvenaud’s 10-year data base includes daily cash prices for Manitoba soybeans. He suspects canadagrain.com is the only source for such data, except individual grain companies, which are unlikely to share it.
Duvenaud started collecting the cash grain prices while running Grassroots, a service that was like the Internet before there was an Internet. Subscribers could get weather and grain market information delivered to a terminal in their homes via a telephone line starting in the early 1980s. The high cost for long-distance telephone service held the technology back.
Duvenaud continued collecting cash grain prices after Grassroots’ demise and still publishes them in Wild Oats.
