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Grain Merchandising: Increasing Your Return in an Inconsistent Market

Jul 3, 2019

Agronomy, Crop Management, Grain, Market Update, Soybean, Technology

Our job as grain merchandisers comprise many different roles.  We feel the most important role is to help our customers earn a respectable return on any given acre of land.  The nature of markets does not allow anyone to consistently sell the top of the market.  Therefore, we strive to match sound agronomic practices and tie them to consistent marketing strategies.  Those strategies, coupled with facilities set up to handle our customers’ needs adds value to the farm.

 

Arthur Companies Grain Elevator in Sunset

 

Proof in the Numbers

One way we benchmark ourselves is to compare our average prices paid for grain across a given marketing year.  This allows us to answer questions such as, “Did we help our customers manage their risk, and earn a return on their acre”.  For the 2017 crop year we compared our average price paid for corn, soybeans and wheat across all our locations during the marketing year.  This includes Arthur, Ayr Page, Pillsbury, Harvey and Anamoose.  We then used that average and compared it to the average price received for all of North Dakota farms for the 2017 marketing year.  The results are shown in Table 1 below.

 

Table 1:  Average Price Received for 2017 Marketing Year

Grain Market Graph Arthur and North Dakota

 

 

 

 

 

Our team is proud of these numbers and the extra gain our merchandising program helped our customers to capture. How much gain are we talking about? For simplicity, on 10 million bushels of soybeans, 10 million bushels of wheat and 20 million bushels of corn Arthur Companies customers would have received $3.4 million dollars more than the North Dakota average.The prices in the table above show that across all Arthur Companies’ shuttle and truck site locations, including Arthur, Ayr, Page, Pillsbury, Harvey and Anamoose, Arthur Companies’ customers were paid more per bushel to the tune of $.14 more for soybeans, $.08 more for corn and $.04 more for wheat.

We continue to evaluate ourselves and strive to help our customers do the best they can in any marketing environment.