Kansas City Board of Trade Closes

Bronze Grain Sculpture at Kansas City Board of Trade (photo credit marnox1)

WSJ:

Friday was the last day of wheat trading in Kansas City, where the hard red variety used to make bread has been bought and sold for 137 years near the banks of the Missouri River. Futures exchange giant CME Group Inc., which bought the Kansas City exchange in December, has already migrated the wheat contracts to its electronic platform and on Monday will move the remaining open-outcry business to its Chicago pits.
A handful of traders who work for big firms are making the move north. Most, though, will stick it out in Kansas City, grappling with the technology reshaping the Midwestern city's role as an agricultural and financial hub.
"Over the last few years, things have gravitated towards the computer," says Mr. Gibson, 67 years old, who plans to set up a brokerage business across the river from the exchange.
After hard red winter wheat was introduced to the region in the 1870s by Russian Mennonite immigrants, Kansas City's railroad lines carried the grain into the city's flour mills and out to the rest of the country and beyond. The exchange became a global destination for farmers and grain buyers to hedge the price of wheat, with trade fueled by a Russian grain crisis in the early 1970s and the Carter administration's 1980 grain embargo.
Consolidation among rail lines and mills has shrunk the city's agricultural profile and set the stage for its attempted revamp as a technology center. Google Inc.  chose Kansas City two years ago as the test site for a high-speed Internet service, luring software designers to so-called hacker hotels—hardwired houses set up near the border of Missouri and Kansas splitting the city.

The open outcry system of bidding is now really only for show.  Computers are doing all the real trading.  The part of that piece about the immigrants bringing the Turkey Red wheat is what really interests me.  Here's a little more about the Volga Germans and Turkey Red wheat:

Many Kansans believe German Mennonites arriving from Russia brought Turkey Red wheat to the state.  German Mennonites, known to be pacifists, had been lured to Russia in the late 1700s with promises of military exemption.  When Russian policy grew hostile in the 1870s, large numbers of this ethnic group left for more fertile lands.
Kansas was the destination of choice for many German-Russians.  Western railroad companies hoped to develop communities along their lines to increase profits through the transport of products and grains.  To populate these communities, they hired German recruiters to facilitate the immigration of skilled farmers from European countries with similar climates.  They recruited not only among the German Mennonites, but also Roman Catholic Germans farming along Russia’s Volga River.  German-Russian immigrants began arriving en masse on the central Great Plains during the 1870s; Mennonites settled in Marion County and Roman Catholics in Ellis County, Kansas.
These immigrants did not come empty-handed.  Family lore states that Mennonite families loaded kitchen crocks and traveling trunks with Turkey Red wheat seed before leaving Russia.  Arriving in Kansas in 1874, they planted their first crop in the rich farm lands around Goessel.  Although corn was the primary grain grown in Kansas at the time, Turkey Red wheat proved well-suited to the Great Plains.  The wheat berry contained more protein (producing the best flour), demonstrated more resistance to disease, and survived the harsh winter conditions following fall planting....But some experts have argued the Turkey Red story is only a myth. They claim it is highly unlikely that immigrants transported enough wheat to plant a significant first crop. In addition, Turkey Red was not the typical wheat variety grown by Mennonites in Russia, casting further doubt on the legend. Though it is difficult to determine who first introduced Turkey Red to Kansas, it is undeniable that German Mennonite communities like Goessel embraced the plant. Today, a vast number of modern wheat varieties grown in Kansas can be genetically traced to Turkey Red.

It may not be true, but it is a good story.