Five-year Record of Farmer Corn/Soybean Marketing. How Does Yours Stack Up?

摘要

One of the most valuable business practices in any business management is the concept of performance "benchmarking", where you compare your own performance in light of known industry "standards". In farming, the most basic is cost of production. Landgrant colleges put great effort and resources into providing cost-of-production standards. We did that for you ourselves in the FOCUS report with this issue just before Christmas. But this week, we're offering performance benchmarks that are just as critical to your competitive position: Marketing performance. USDA goes through an elaborate process to estimate the percentage of crops that are sold by farmers each month of the marketing year. It uses these to "weight" its estimate of "average price received by farmers" over the whole crop year in its monthly supply/demand and price forecasts.