Cash Grain Contracting: HOW TO EXPLAIN THE NEW CONTRACTS TO FARMER CUSTOMERS AND MANAGEMENT

摘要

This article is based on a portion of a presentation made in December at the National Grain and Feed Association's Country Elevator Council Meeting in Denver, CO. The speaker was Scott Irwin, professor of agricultural marketing and price analysis at the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois, Urbana (217-333-2792). Crop marketing often is a frustrating exercise for farmers, for a number of reasons: Crop prices are extremely volatile, both within the marketing year and from year to year. Crop prices are difficult to predict. A lot of forces interact in complex ways to determine price. These forces include planted acreage, yield, trade issues, livestock numbers, farm program policies, even environmental factors suchas the arrival of soybean rust in the United States last fall.