CropBooster® Oligo Prime® and RR SoyBooster® Oligo Prime® in corn, soybean and wheat crops Agro-100 has conducted over 100 trials to confirm the value of its new Oligo Prime® technology. In corn, average yield increases were greater than 6 bu/acre. Talk to your Agro-100 representative or Ag retailer. 1 866 770.8887 • www.agro-100.com download the Agro100 application for free today! Proven Biostimulant Tank Mix Program activated by OligoPrime® 7.indd 1 2024-10-25 5:05 PM 8 This is where discipline is critical to a successful marketing plan. Sellers of crop need to have realistic expectations for their pricing targets and be decisive enough to book before the opportunity gets away. Some combination of target pricing orders and calendar deadlines (such as booking 10 per cent of the crop each week for the six-week spring season) are good tools to help keep the marketing plan on track. RISK JUNKIES I chuckle a little bit at grain producers who aren’t comfortable forward contracting because they “don’t want to take on the risk.” When you look at the business dynamics of grain farming, it’s pretty clear that anyone who makes their living in this line of work is an absolute risk junkie. Who else would invest millions of dollars in land, equipment, and crop inputs and then use it in a way that is vulnerable to local weather, weather in other parts of the world, and a whole host of geopolitical issues, including wars and embargos and then say that they are uncomfortable with risk? Commodity markets are certainly volatile by nature, but constructing a marketing plan that lets us lock in prices at appropriate times is one of the few tools we have to mitigate risk. A farm business has something of a risk balance sheet. On the one side are all of the areas where our grain farming operations take on risk. We are committed to expenses on items like land, equipment, crop inputs, and labour, and on the other side, we need to off-set the risk by locking in certainty on the revenue side using tools like crop insurance to create certainty about yield, and forward contracted sales to create certainty about price and cash flow. Steve Kell is a delegate in District 11 (Dufferin, Simcoe, Halton, Peel, York). He farms in Simcoe County and is the grain merchandiser for Kell Grain Elevators.• continued from page 7 Cover story
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