Originally posted by Stan:
Much like our need for strategic petroleum reserves, policymakers will soon have to come to terms with/or acknowledge that having grain reserves has become just as urgent.
You are probably quite correct, but tend to doubt that it goes anywhere, particularly after our experiences back in the 1960's and 1970's.

We used to have what you are talking about (Strategic Reserves), but it ended up being a giant boondoogle on a scale that was almost beyond imagination. It really was a mess, and if you talk to the guys who were active "back in the day", well they still tell stories about it. Let's just say that it tended to be a real life version of "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

Seriously, it was bad, and then congress started using the program as "welfare for farmers", and honestly, that just made things worse - even for the farming community.

Remember all the "surplus cheese" owned by the USDA? It wasn't limited to just cheese.

You can only store crops for so long before they go bad (even under the best of conditions), so then you had storage issues, and then there was the program where the feds would provide subsidies for farmer's grain bins, storing federally acquired feed grain, and the audits, and the record keeping, and - what an overall, never ending nightmare.

One of the biggest problems you see today in the AG marketplace is that our storage capacity isn't up to the needs. Demand for building new grain storage has a backlog, and up into December, 2007 it was actually getting longer.

Tend to doubt they (and I mean the farming community in particular) wants to deal with that type of government program any more.