[bshipp]

I've worked in agriculture all my life and a case like this doesn't surprise me in the least, nor does the inevitable responses in social media that infantalize farmers as dumb hicks who have to be protected from themselves. If you're responding to a buyer offering an $57,000 contract with an emoji you're not acting very professionally. This is nothing more than seller's remorse. You'd better believe that this farmer would be threatening lawsuits if the price for flax had fallen in the meantime and the buyer was the one arguing about the thumbs-up signal. Regardless, this shouldn't have been an issue at all if the farmer had adequately hedged his position with an offsetting buy option at the sale price that would have captured any significant price movement (outside of any basis shift).

This farmer was playing loose with risk management and wanted someone to eat his $25,000 mistake (higher $82K later crop value minus original approx $57K contract value at $17/bu for 86 tonnes).

The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that this farmer completely forgot about the sale agreement and this argument about the emoji was a post-hoc invention by his lawyer to try and weasel out of paying the terminal $82,000. This amount of flax is likely grown on about a quarter section in Saskatchewan, or 160 acres. The average grain farm size is almost 1,800 acres, so this size would be less than 10% of the total harvested area, and many farms are double and triple that size. Easy to forget about six months after the text exchange.