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Produced by Wayne T. Parman
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It is a great pleasure to finally present you a plan to collaborate on building a "Gold Standard" database of crop production costs for Argentina, Brazil, Russia, the United States, and Ukraine. Marty Ruikka (roo-i-ka), president of ProExporter Network, and I are contacting you and three other professional grain/oilseed analysts to join PRX in this project. The other three also are receiving this email today. Our hope is to develop a shared database that provides all our individual companies and your proprietary clients with comparable crop cost of production data for the major exporters in the world's grain export hubs. In the letter below, we introduce ProExporter and explain our vision for the collaboration. More details of how the collaboration would work, its suggested legal framework, and how we can share the data are included in the attachment "PRX Cost of Production Database Concept." You can read more about PRX here. Its client base is primarily in the US, along with a few Canadian and Mexican companies.
We hope you will join us. I have known and worked with Marty and Bill Hudson, his partner and original founder of ProExporter, for eight years. They are well-known in US grain markets and in US agricultural policy circles in Washington D.C. They also are excellent students of our markets, as well as good businessmen, and I heartily recommend them as good people to work with. In the letter, I have attached three graphs a recent working paper about China's demand for grains, oilseeds, and meat that Bill has been developing for presentation at PRX's semi-annual conference on August 17. After you have studied the materials, please contact me with any questions or say
"Yes"!
Regards,
Wayne
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Introductory Letter from Marty and Wayne T. Parman
Marty Ruikka, principal owner of The ProExporter Network (PRX), and I are pleased to invite you to collaborate with us in developing a 10-year historical and one-year forward-looking data base of crop production costs for major grain and oilseed crops in the three major world export hubs of the US, South America, and the Black Sea.
PRX can provide data and expertise for the US and is seeking partners to provide similar data and expertise covering South America and the Black Sea. The goal is to have the "Gold Standard of Crop Production Cost Information." The methodology would be to create a central database of crop production costs denominated in local currencies. These would be (1) collected and transmitted by the participating partners from each region, (2) managed electronically and analyzed by PRX in Chelsea, MI, and (3) reported to all participating partners as summaries of costs in all countries on a regular basis. For example, Argentine data would be sent to the PRX database from Buenos Aires, the data would be collated and summarized, and reports of those data would be available to all other partners for use by their proprietary clients.
Each partner also would provide an expected farmer marketing price in local currency per metric ton to calculate a farmer gross margin. We anticipate using a public source for currency exchange rates, such as the Interbank Market, for translating local costs to US dollars per hectare and dollars per acre. Each partner has local expertise and the sharing builds a bridge among the export hubs so that crop cost information and comparisons are available to all. PRX will compile, analyze and report results in tables, charts and graphs via PDF and/or PowerPoint documents as appropriate. The analysis will evolve over time as we get feedback from partners and clients. Distribution of reports will be from PRX to Partners. Partners will then transmit to reports to their respective clients. This professional networking arrangement is designed to pool our local expertise into a comparative report useful for all members. It is not an effort to pool our respective clients. Each partner's client relationships will be respected.
Click Here for a longer explanation of who PRX is and how the collaboration would work, including the legal form it would have, your choice to be identified as the data source in your country, and an option for opting out of the group, if you chose to do that at a later date. We've also included an example of the PRX Blue Sky Model Corn/Bean Income Report.
We are excited about the chance to work with the best analysts in major grain export countries to develop a very valuable tool for everyone to use in his own business. We understand you may need time to evaluate our proposal. We would appreciate letting us know your decision by replying to this email at your convenience. If you have questions, please contact Wayne initially.
 
 Regards,
Marty Ruikka Wayne T. Parman
Marty Ruikka Wayne T. Parman
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