As oddsmakers and fans adjust their expectations for who’s going to win the Stanley Cup, market analysts are crunching the numbers on how many acres of each crop farmers will plant this spring, with the Statistics Canada acreage report coming out on Friday.
Dwight Nichol of DLN AgVentures joined RealAg Radio on Tuesday (before the Oilers’ game four loss) for a light-hearted conversation about the methodology involved in coming up with crop forecasts, drawing the analogy to picking a playoff hockey winner.
“It’s an imperfect science, just like predicting the markets,” he notes, adding it’s easy to get caught up in emotion, noise and hearsay from others around you.
That means pulling data from as many relevant sources as you can, including historical StatsCan numbers, forward prices, and your own cost-of-production figures.
“I basically treat Western Canada as if it were my farm. I have all the crops as options that I can grow, the history of what I’ve grown in the past, and I look at what’s performed well, heavily weighted to the previous year,” he explains.
Listen below, as Nichol takes us through his process of coming up with crop estimates, previews what he’s expecting in Friday’s report, and predicts this year’s Stanley Cup winner:
Related: 22.5 Million Reasons To Plant Canola — Dwight Nichol
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