Reader comments
Buying wheat now takes lot more 'bread'

dale bishop | 3:30 a.m. March 15, 2008

Spectacular - It might pay to own a wheat farm.

Andrew Teasdale | 5:11 a.m. March 15, 2008

This story is HUGE. As the dollar falls, the price of wheat will continue to rise. In another six months, this story will talk about how wheat is 10 times the price it was. Now, think about all those people living on the edge of their income. Bread will be $3 (gas will be $5/gal., milk $5). What happens when they canï¿½t afford to eat?
Did you know? The U.S. and Canada back in February of this year agreed to use the MILITARY from either nation to send troops across each otherï¿½s borders during civil unrest (nope ï¿½ not a conspiracy theory ï¿½ google ï¿½Canada troops USï¿½). Ask yourself what the advantage would be for the military to have Canadian troops on the ground in the US. You wonï¿½t like the answer. (This should also help you understand the disdain the current administration has for the Constitution)
So, for those of you who have your savings in dollars ï¿½ this should be a wakeup call as well. Consider moving them to another currency or to a commodity like gold or silver. You might also want to buy a bit of wheat at todayï¿½s comparatively cheap prices.

Pete | 6:11 a.m. March 15, 2008

Then you go to the grocery store and see them throwing away dozens of loves of bread, cake, donuts, cookies and rolls that did not sell. Solution: Bake Less.

Comments continue below

JR | 7:25 a.m. March 15, 2008

Yes, just what we need, more government "help."

Wheat Farmer | 7:33 a.m. March 15, 2008

Where was everybody when wheat was at a al time low? Nobody was running to Pres. Bush to have him Adress the issue then.

Schweitzer | 7:41 a.m. March 15, 2008

Vote with your pocketbook; buy produce low on the food chain, eat less meat, both red and white. Though wheat and wheat-based products will continue to rise in price, due to our seriously neglected energy crisis, meat will inevitably rise as well. Also, support locally grown food, that doesn't have to be trucked across the country from Iowa to Utah. Support Utah agriculture, buy Cache Valley dairy products and other local ag.

Utah Valley Resident (Original) | 8:14 a.m. March 15, 2008

This article is alarming and validates what wheat growers and consumers have been saying for years. The commodity cost and storage of surpluses in the world and the U.S.A are increasing in cost and supply, more so than world gasoline prices. The U.S.A. government policy of forcing corning prices skyward by instituting this leftwing liberal idea of making a fuel additive out of corn is insane. Corn is for cattle and other animals and humans, and is used for making cerals, tortillas and other products; not to go in anyones gas tank. We are also going to have more Mexicans coming to American with this policy. Please U.S.A. government, let's abandon this subsidy of corn growers to make ethonol, and start drilling in our own backyard, get our financial house in order with balanced budgets, and get the farmers back to growing the crops as they were years ago, to feed American and the world. Get your years supply of food items, including wheat. This coninuing news about commodity shortages is alarming, and should be in the mainstream tv news to wake people up, instead of hearing constantly about murders and mayhem 24/7 as we do.

Anonymous | 9:31 a.m. March 15, 2008

Interesting article.. I just left a comment on a Wall St. board about a young man bragging that he had 70 percent of his assets tied up in Gold, Silver and Cash reserves.. I reminded him that he should try eating Gold, Cash reserves, and Silver for dinner tonight... I can see that old prophesy coming... Someday we will trade a pound of gold for a pound of wheat..

MiniWheat | 10:04 a.m. March 15, 2008

A person should eat no more than 2 slices of bread per day and it should be whole grain. Eat more oatmeal, less bread.

Blame Corn Ethanol | 10:54 a.m. March 15, 2008

The reason food is going up so much is that much farmland is being taken out of food production to make ethanol to fuel cars.

This might be a decent trade off if it didn't take 2 gallons of oil to make 3 gallong of ethanol. Making ethanol from corn is most inefficient. We either should do it like Brazil does, efficiently or not at all. It cost tax dollars to subdize and it raises the price of food.

Ralph | 11:02 a.m. March 15, 2008

And yet the government says that inflation is under control. I don't get it. ALL commodity prices are way up. Petroleum is the base for a myriad of everyday consumer items. The price of gas drives just about everything higher for delivery costs. If inflation isn't at least in the 6 to 8 percent range, then there is no war in Iraq !! Who is kidding who........ ???

John | 11:12 a.m. March 15, 2008

How stupid is it, to put our food supply, into our gas tanks?

This is the result of environazis, convincing everyone about global warming, and how crude is disappearing, both of which are total lies.

When I first told people about this scenario, as globalony started to take hold, they all laughed and said there was no reason for anyone to try to use it as an excuse for money and power, Well, here it is, and life in the United States will never be the same again.

Get used to not having, because its all going overseas. Imagine us paying $18 a bushel for wheat, while our government sells wheat to a bitter enemy like China? Keep voting for the same people. Look where they got us so far.

It's self inflicted folks. Get off your cell phone, turn off your mp3 player, and take a long hard look at where we are. Its possible that we could salvage some of the Republic, but I don't think Americans are smart enough to even see the problem anymore.

The frog is in the pan, and the water has about reached boiling. Goodbye frog. Good by America.

Chris | 12:12 p.m. March 15, 2008

Calm down. Go back to reading alarmist propaganda from the false prophet Alex Jones.

Wheat will stabilize in this coming year due to more farmers capitalizing off the high prices. We have plenty of water in the USA this year, meaning there will be plenty of wheat for all next. Unless there is some catastrophic plague of insects or bacteria that targets specifically wheat...

And to those people that are mad "we" are selling our grain to "our enemy" China. That is what free markets are about, if China is willing to pay more for it who are you to tell them they can't sell it to them for a higher profit?

This shows you governments, specifically ours, need to keep their hands off our economy. Stop subsidizing farmers to grow a specific crop or to not grow at all. We have to grow as much as farmers are willing to, without government intervention and store up more grain in our times of surplus for possible hard times in the future. Grain can store for 30 years and still hold its nutritious value.

Prepare now and you won't suffer in the future no matter what that future brings.

Phil | 12:16 p.m. March 15, 2008

How funny it is to heart people blame this on ethanol. Price of wheat is high mostly because of the droughts in the wheat belt, and australia in the last few years. We have not had a bad year for production of corn in seven years. Usally have a bad year one in four. We have a bad year for producing corn, corn will go through the roof. Wheat will come back down because so much more is being grown. Federal government is not letting land owners out of CRP contracts. If they did it might send the price of wheat to nothing. I am not for ethanol, but it not pushing the cost of wheat up.

Limit the Orient | 12:29 p.m. March 15, 2008

As the last paragraph suggests, please, government, limit what Japan and China can buy. They are buying it up, storing it on our ground, and then selling it at exorbitant prices. Please stop this.

liberal larry | 12:40 p.m. March 15, 2008

With two billion people from Indian and China attempting to live the American, consumptive, lifestyle the price of all commodities has been on the rise. Copper, oil, gold and wheat, are all near record highs. Get used to the new era of scarcity.

Lelaine | 12:45 p.m. March 15, 2008

So where will we go to get our bread????
Wheat is a pretty big commodity to be forgetting... so we can put corn in our gas tanks......HELLO..........Whose brainchild idea was it to grow the fuel for our tanks? I don't think this issue is going to go away anytime this year or even next year.

Johnson | 1:51 p.m. March 15, 2008

John11;12;
The "environazis" (good to get your strident biases out on the table quickly, John; it saves the rest of us time) that I know are totally opposed to fuel from food policies, because they've thought a lot about where our food comes from. And crude isn't disappearing? Gee, I thought when I burned it in my tank (a rarefied version of it, anyway), that it turned into CO2 and H2O, and wasn't "crude" any longer. If you can show me, scientifically, how that is not a disappearing act, you and I can make a lot of money off the energy crisis.

Todd | 2:01 p.m. March 15, 2008

This past Wednesday we purchased additional wheat for our food storage from a local (Salt Lake City) vendor. The cost was $23.00 per 50# bag for hard white wheat. To put this cost in perspective, in June '06 we purchased wheat from this same vendor for $9.27 per 50# bag. This translates into a 148% increase in price in about a 20 month period.

good for the farmers | 2:28 p.m. March 15, 2008

I've never heard a group of people complain more than farmers do ..... maybe they can stop bellyachin' about everything now that they're making big bucks on their crops......let me guess.... their fuel costs are so high that they aren't making nearly what they should be....

Ace Ventura | 2:56 p.m. March 15, 2008

A good friend of mine in the grain markets pointed out recently that not only are we sinking our own ship by using grain to create ethanol, but we are allowing foreign nations who have no concern for our strategic issues buy up whole harvests of grain. Japan just purchased all the remaining 2007 crop of spring wheat. Did they buy it for their own consumption? Not a chance! It's still sitting in OUR grain elevators, waiting for the price to go up even more so they can sell it to us at a profit. We sold a huge consignment of wheat to Russia in mid 2007, which just sold some of it back to us at a huge profit.

RE oil: we have turned over our financial well-being and national security to avowed enemies of our country. Meanwhile we sit on huge reserves of oil shale in eastern Utah that exceed all the oil in the Middle East and is now practical to extract at today's crude prices. ANWR also represents enormous oil reserves that would remove us from the OPEC stranglehold.

We won't go into the issue of foreign powers' U.S.-dollar holdings. We must start thinking strategically!

Thrifty | 4:03 p.m. March 15, 2008

Americans will never put themselves on an oil diet unless forced into it. We could start with some of the most obvious abuses....like banning those huge SUVs that suck up so much gas. Does anyone really need a Hummer??? Small SUVs do the same thing, only they're cheaper to operate. Also, ask yourself how much of your road time is discretionary driving vs. necessary driving? For teenage drivers, it's probably 90 percent discretionary. Face it, we Americans want our cake and want to eat it too. Unfortunately, we may soon find the cake is too expensive for most of us.

attilathehun | 4:26 p.m. March 15, 2008

We need to end any and all subsidies for ethanol production, pronto, and start sucking all the oil we can out of ANWAR. Our idiot brigade in Washington needs a serious beating, and I don't mean at the polls, but with a pole. Think about it--we give tax dollars to Iowa farmers to help them produce an inefficient fuel that costs more to produce than regular fuel, while simultaneously driving the price of food sky high. Nutshell--we, the taxpayers, are PAYING for the privilege of driving up the price of the food we have to buy. We'd actually be better off BURNING the dollars in our fireplaces--at least then we'd get a warmth benefit out of it. Our current crop of politicians really put the "special" in special ed.

too much sense | 4:58 p.m. March 15, 2008

@ attilathehun: great point! It was as reasoned and to the point as many of Ron Paul's points in the Republican debates ( like borrowing money from China to give to Pakistan etc)
No wonder the MSM treated him like a kook ...

Sweating is Sweet | 5:36 p.m. March 15, 2008

I'll feel safer on my bicycle, with more SUVs sitting in driveways, because gas is so expensive.

Knead That Dough | 5:41 p.m. March 15, 2008

As usual, the mainstream media clues you in when it's too late to do anything about it. I watched this coming a long time ago. Even so, I still felt stupid buying a bunch of wheat for $8.00 per 50# bag.
I don't feel stupid anymore.

AZreader | 6:56 p.m. March 15, 2008

"There is a portent of stormy weather ahead to which we had better give heed." -Pres. Hinckley
Hmmm......How many times did he tell us?

BlackwellOkie | 9:35 p.m. March 15, 2008

Here in our little LDS branch in rural Oklahoma it became a cliche phrase to pray for the "ponds and streams" to be filled with rain because the lazy members of the branch wouldn't have to haul water to their cattle. Their prayers were answered and we had a record rainfall year as well as a 3-billion dollar wheat crop loss because of excessive rain. No wheat crop for Oklahoma but the ponds and streams were filled. Heavenly Father was a sense of humor. We shouldn't pray for something we might get and wouldn't know how to handle the consequences.

It is already here | 11:27 p.m. March 15, 2008

We are in a recession.

Anonymous | 1:25 a.m. March 16, 2008

Americans need to comeof their wheat consumption anyway. All the cookies, cakes, and brownies are making them tubs of carb made fat. Let them eat cabbage.

David | 11:21 a.m. March 16, 2008

A bushel of wheat make 73 loves of bread so, at $12.50 a bushel there is 17cents worth of wheat in a loaf of bread.Did you ever wonder what the wraper,freight and the tie cost? I don't understand why it such a big sin for the farmer to make a profit.

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