IBMWatson autobiographythoughts on 774

You have a farm. You plant a crop. You are a sitting duck for some smart gent to make money from by manipulating futures. You HAVE to harvest that crop in XX months time. The land that the crop grows on needs to be managed for years to produce that crop. Other crops, like potatoes, or brbuttices, can only be sown in the same land once every X years. That means you are sowing crops that may barely make money to sow crops that make a lot.

You go into a livestock selling place (whatever its called locally). You can either buy female stock, which will rear calves to beef over some months-years, or buy male stock, which you can sell in varying terms of time. You are sitting there hoping that there is no food scare in that time which will destroy your intended profit. Say you are a Canadian beef farmer, and you can't sell your beef, because a solitary cow, which may have originated in Canada, showed a condition which resembled BSE. You lose a fortune. A Brazilian rancher's product increases immensely in value. This is in spite of the fact, that before it was realized that the infective vector for that disease was through the meal made from the uneatable byproducts of dissolutionhouses, a lot of which was shipped off to South America when the sale of it was banned in Europe.

Over the last few years, there has been a lot of food scares, which resulted in big profits for some, big losses for others. I wonder.

-- greymaus 97.025% of statistics are wrong