Yesterday an agronomist rang me to see whether I could find out the price for oilseed rape 25 years ago in 1982 for a presentation he is giving next week.
Luckily we have most, if not all, old copies of FW hiding in cupboards in the office – a fact I only found out yesterday – so finding the spot price wasn’t too difficult. Want to know what it was? £265/t – probably because no where near as much was grown 25 years ago.
Interestingly, feed wheat on that day was trading at £108/t, milling £114/t. Being an anorak for figures, and after discovering how easy to search our back catalogue is, I did a quick check of prices for every five years since then. It doesn’t half show the volatility of the past 25 years!
See price table below.
Spot Price/t_____Milling wheat_____Feed wheat_______Oilseed rape
Sept 82___________£114____________£108____________£265
Sept 87___________£140____________£104____________£220
Sept 92___________£138____________£108____________£110
Sept 97___________£101____________£82_____________£152
Sept 02___________£75_____________£58_____________£152
Sept 07___________£202____________£170____________£227
Comments (1)
I'm not sure that the OSR price of the early 1980s is strictly comparable to today's price.
If I remember rightly, there was a subsidy element paid per tonne of crop which inflated the value somewhat. It was trading around £300/tonne in the late '80s, but the value dropped back sharply towards the end of the decade when the subsidy regime changed
Comment left on September 13, 2007 11:54 AM
Posted on September 13, 2007 11:54