More Sense Per Bushel
Forty-Four Years Since the First Leg Motor
I was twelve years old the first time anyone trusted me with a grain elevator. Fifteen dollars a day, harvest of 1966, a private family storage siding in Clyde, Washington. Up at 5:30, breakfast, then a ride with Uncle Paul up to combine camp. My job was to have the pit empty and the leg running before the first truck rolled in.
There's a rule you learn fast and never forget: always start the leg motor before you open the feeder trap. Get that backwards and you'll know it. All day you listen to the leg — the belt of buckets that hauls wheat from the boot below the floor up to the bin — and you learn its hum. A change in pitch is rarely good news.
Sweep the tanks. Close the traps. Grease the shafts. Tally the trucks. And above everything else — catch the last truck back to the house, because nobody's coming to get you until after supper.
Nobody taught me commodities theory that summer. But I learned what markets never put in a report: what it actually costs, in attention, to move a bushel of wheat without losing it. Forty-four years later, that's still the question underneath every chart I publish.
The Long Way Here
- Elevator hand — family grain storage, Clyde & Waitsburg, WA1966–1969
- Harvest truck driver — Walla Walla County1970–1973
- Undergraduate studies — Eastern Washington University
- Teamsters Union — Spokane, WA
- M.A., International Management — American Graduate School of International Management (AGSIM)1982
- Grain buyer & merchandiser — Grain Terminal Association
- Futures trader — Minneapolis Grain Exchange
- Stockbroker — Dean Witter, Phoenix
- Introducing Broker — Index Futures Group, Walla Walla1990–
- Instructor, Agricultural Economics — Walla Walla Community College
- Founder, REAP — Risk Education & Awareness Program, USDA grant-supported
- Founder, MarketBullets® — Waitsburg, WA2020–
What I Did With That
Somewhere along that path I noticed the same thing over and over: the people actually carrying the price risk — the growers, not the desks — had the least access to real intelligence about it. Institutional traders had teams, terminals, and analysts. A producer had a radio and a hunch.
So I built REAP, because somebody needed to translate what the desks knew into something a producer could use before calling the elevator. MarketBullets is REAP's direct descendant — the same premise, sharpened by forty-four years and built around a discipline I call Box-o-Rox: proof that the signals that matter most are rarely the complicated ones.
Why I'm Still Up at 5:30
I know what a bad year costs a family operation, because I grew up inside one. Margins have never been this thin, and a marketing decision made without good information isn't a small mistake — it's the kind that shows up in an operating loan for years. That's not abstract to me.
MarketBullets exists so the person calling their elevator at 7:30 — or the merchandiser at a desk before the open — has something better than a hunch: verified USDA and CFTC data, read by someone who's actually stood in the pit, delivered before the rest of the industry wakes up.
More Sense Per Bushel isn't a tagline. It's what I owed the twelve-year-old who learned to listen for the hum.
These days I don't do it alone. My son Gabriel — Gabe — works alongside me now, building the tools and carrying the work forward. The boots get smaller. The decisions get bigger. This is how it's supposed to go.
Hello, World!
