The rest of the world deals in a grain called maize in units of kilograms or metric tons. It's passed due time the U.S. did, as well.

If you travel around Europe, you'll find places called the Corn or Korn Market (depends on which country you are in). Sorry, it does not mean maize. The word translates to grain. Grain in those places more often meant wheat, rye, barley, oats and so forth, since there was no maize in the Old World at the time these places were named.

My great-great-grandmother immigrated from Ireland where she'd been a poor tenant farmer. The only oral legend handed down from her was a comment about the hated English riding through the corn on their fox hunts. No husking hooks associated with this corn. She meant what we'd call small grains.

The metric system is slowly but surely taking over. Our refrigerators and tool boxes reflect this. Every new measuring instrument I buy can handle metric and I use it more and more in common applications. This tendency will increase. Science, medicine, military - if you are engaged in them you are using metric. Aviation is a hybrid. Anywhere but the US you use metric such as meters of altitude and millibars of pressure, but in the US we still use feet and inches of mercury. But when you fly to anywhere else, you will be told what to do in metric units.

My point is simple - the agricultural market is global and it's time we recognized that and joined it and one of the first steps to take is to use common measurement systems. A set of weights and measures makes it easier to understand global reports without trying to figure out how many bushels is in a metric ton.

If one believes the local cash price is the only market information one needs, one can use any unit of weight and measure one likes, but if one think futures are not based on units that are measured everywhere else in the world in metric tons, one has a narrow view of marketing that can affect one's ability to understand and use world-wide information.

I lived in Germany for 10 years and know from personal experience that converting to the metric system for the most part is pretty simple. We don't really care what number is on the thermometer, we want to know if it's fit to plant, what to wear, if sun-block is needed. Many of us can now reach for a 13mm wrench as easily as we'd reach for 1/2" just by sight.

For me, the easiest way to imagine area is to use the chain and furlong method. It's pretty easy for us to see a furlong as half the length of a 40 acre field fence or 660' and a chain is four rods or 66', which we can relate to equipment width. Having a feel for 66' X 660' is 43,560 or an acre is handy but the mental math is a lot easier dealing in 10s based arithmetic as the metric system is.

Are we at a disadvantage in a change-over when not all can quickly relate a comfortable bushels per acre or truckload number to a new kilograms per hectare or truckload? Maybe but I doubt if it's serious. The first step is to convert a few common bench mark numbers. 56 lbs is about 25 kg. 1000 bushels of corn then is about the same as 25,000 kg of maize. Later, of course, we quit converting and think directly in the new units.

Do I hear "kicking and screaming" and "over my dead body"? I suppose. I could try to buy a two-liter bottle of Coke by the quart. We're all heading that way and faster rather than slower. I could get rid of my metric tools and see how long i can last using a crescent wrench and pliers.

If you've made it this far, you probably already know two things. First, I actually do believe we should go metric instantly. Secondly, it's been too quiet around here and I am not against poking a stick in a hornet's nest to liven things up.