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Chuck Penner, Le field Commodity Research ARE CURRENT PRICES GOOD OR BAD? PRICES With all the hubbub going on in pulse markets, including concerns about India, acreage guesses for 2018 and weather concerns, it's not a bad idea to step back and evaluate where prices are at. The ques on of whether current price levels for pulses are good or bad can be answered in a few ways. For farmers, higher is almost always be er (although high prices can some mes trigger responses that aren't posi ve). To gain some perspec ve, we like to take a longer-term look at price levels. This type of extended view helps avoid "recency bias" where the latest events can distort a realis c price expecta on. Some mes it's hard to remember where prices were a few years ago. It's also typical to think that the last few years are now the "new normal". For pulses, it's probably fair to say the extreme vola lity of the past couple of years has affected or maybe even distorted farmers' price expecta ons. There are a number of ways to get this perspec ve, but one tool we use to gain perspec ve is a 10-year price chart, as shown below for yellow peas. It's probably a lot easier to remember the $14.07 high than it is to recall the $4.24 lows back in 2010. The latest prairie-wide average price just shy of $7.00 per bushel looks poor compared to the peak in 2016, but if we were just coming off the depressed market from the beginning of the decade, it would seem much more posi ve. Thus the value of perspec ve. A few other calcula ons help provide more context. Market advisors o en talk about selling the crop in the top- third of prices. That's great in theory but unfortunately, picking off those higher prices isn't always possible, at least in the short-term. It's also not clear how that "top third" is defined; some people rely on a vague idea of where that top third should be. For our analysis, we use the last 10 years. By that measure, the top third means yellow pea prices would have to be above $8.58 per bushel to achieve the goal of "top third marke ng". That could take a while. Calcula ons also show that prices were below $6.58 per bushel one third of the me over the last 10 years. Current bids are now in the middle third, although more to the lower side. The average (mean) yellow pea price over the last 10 years has been $7.74 2 6