Exactly, there's an opportunity for us to use more barley as well. As soon as we're done here, everybody can race over there and use up their share of barley, if they possibly can.
Mr. Otto did a comparison on a number of different varieties of wheat last fall. He felt that was important and he felt farmers needed to understand what's going on in the system across the border. He had done a comparison between the price of spring wheat with protein at 13.5% under the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly and spring wheat with protein of 14% in the United States. Because we use a different system of measuring protein, those two levels are pretty much identical; they're equivalent.
He thought he would try to be as fair as he possibly could, so he took the October 19 Minneapolis December futures quotes of $211 for his comparison. That day in Shelby, Montana, the cash price for 14% protein spring wheat was $4.75 per bushel in U.S. funds, which at that time amounted to $5.32 per bushel in Canadian funds. If he delivered his grain in Shelby, Montana, he would have been able to get $5.32 a bushel for it.
He went back and said let's do something comparable in the Canadian system. He took the Canadian Wheat Board's fixed price contract for October 19 to use his comparison. They quoted hard red spring wheat at a fixed price off the Minneapolis futures of $211. They always include a basis in there to protect themselves, and it was about $12. They take off their own adjustment factors, so they took $5 off per tonne in an adjustment factor and it ended up being $219 Vancouver. He took off his elevator deductions for freight, handling, and cleaning, which are well over $1 a bushel. That brings us to another important issue for western Canadian farmers and that, of course, is the cost of transportation and handling fees. Mr. Otto's fees on that grain alone were $45 a tonne. You're looking at almost $1.25, or more than $1.10 for handling and freight on the grain. That put his price at $174 when compared to Shelby. His net price was $174.
That shows, Mr. Chair, if you do the math, that $21 went missing out of that. On the Canadian side of the border on that day, his discount was $21.43. I know that may not be important to most of the people who are sitting here, because it's just a number, but I think that's around 65¢ to 70¢ a bushel. If you take your average farm and you've 100,000 bushels of grain in the bin--and in that part of the world that's not unusual, but at 60¢ or 75¢ per bushel that's a lot of money--you begin to see why farmers are frustrated with the system.
Larry is a producer, and I know some of the other people here are. When you think about $60,000 going out the window just because you can't access a price that's available somewhere else, it's surprising that farmers aren't a lot angrier than they are. I'm often surprised why that isn't the case.
He compared hard red spring wheat as well, and winter wheat, and he found some of the same things had happened. I won't read it all to you, but he says that in the end it cost his farm $45,000 just on one winter wheat crop alone. If he's got $45,000 on just his winter wheat on his farm, how much is it costing western Canadian farmers? It's tens of millions of dollars at the very least. It's really frustrating.
He makes the point and says he often hears people say that if we open things up in western Canada, that leaves people at the mercy of the big multinationals. The question he asked is, why is the price higher in Shelby, Montana, than it is under the single desk system? What's going on? Why do we get less money for our grain than producers do who use the open markets in the United States? What are the reasons for that, especially when people say there's the threat of the multinationals who are going to be taking our--