The open market outperformed the Canadian Wheat Board 's pooling system in the 2009-10 crop year according to the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association.

"We looked at over 300 elevators in the northern-tier States. DTN and the Minneapolis Grain Exchange run a daily cash price index based on those actual cash prices that farmers receive. This year the Wheat Board's final pool payment came in basically at the lows of the marketplace," says Wheat Growers Manitoba Vice-President Rolf Penner. "The final pool price for Hard Red Spring wheat 13.5 percent protein for Manitoba, when you take the basic Manitoba deductions off, is about 185.87 dollars per tonne. What we saw with that average in the United States was 197.80 dollars per tonne. So there's a 12 dollar per tonne difference."

"The analysis shows there were only 11 days throughout the entire crop year in which a U.S. farmer would have got a lower price than the pool price received by prairie farmers," says Penner.

When asked about the relevance and value of comparing the average US elevator contract to the pool contract offered by the CWB, Penner says it's a fair comparison.

"They have a slightly different way of calculating the protein in the States, but a 13.5 sample in Canada would test 14 percent in the United States, so it is an apples-to-apples comparison."

CWB pricing is often compared to the USDA's weighted average.

"We're not fond of using the USDA weighted average. We don't feel it's a real apples-to-apples comparison. There are a number of reasons why. First, the USDA doesn't separate by grades, protein and those kinds of things. It's really a mixed bag across all grades and proteins, everything including feed is mixed in. There's nothing in the calculation for forward pricing which I think a lot of farmers in the United States would do. They use a slightly different crop year and it's a really hard one to do a fair exchange rate calculation on," says Penner. "Having said all that, the USDA weighted average for the 09/10 crop year, even with all those things going against it, still wound up being a higher price than the final pool price for 09/10."