Strategic Marketing for Your Farm's Future

Marketing is a stressful and frustrating task that can become more complicated if you do not have a full understanding of some of the basic terms. During this video, Jenna Nees with Purdue Extension will discuss basic marketing terms you may want to be aware of as you try new marketing avenues.

At the lowest level, technical analysis is the use of historical price charts to predict the short-term direction of prices within commodity markets. During this video, Jenna Nees with Purdue Extension will introduce you to a few of the basic trends and patterns utilized when doing technical analysis.

One area that may go overlooked when developing a marketing strategy is the idea of diversifying. Join Michael Langemeier, Professor & Associate Director, Center for Commercial Agriculture, Purdue University as he discusses how diversification impacts the development of a marketing strategy for farming operation.

You may have wondered what impact outlook information can have on your marketing strategy. Purdue Extension Educators Ed Farris and Adam Shanks discuss what an outlook is and how you can utilize it when developing your marketing strategy during this video.

One way to overcome some of the frustration and stress caused by marketing is by developing a written marketing plan.  Purdue Extension Educators Ed Farris and Adam Shanks discuss the reasons behind having a written marketing plan and what contributes to the plan during this video.

Understanding what your breakeven cost is for your farming operation is an important aspect in developing your marketing strategy. Join Michael Langemeier, Professor & Associate Director, Center for Commercial Agriculture, Purdue University as he discusses the components of breakeven costs and discusses how to utilize breakeven prices when developing your marketing strategy.

Goals can help you determine where you would like your farming operation to be in 2, 4, or even 5 years down the road.  During this video, Kelly Heckaman with Purdue Extension will introduce the concept of SMART goals and provide examples of goals you might want to develop for your farming operation.

In this short video learn about how an improved understanding of basis, the relationship between cash and futures market prices, can help you become a better grain marketer. During the video you’ll learn how to use the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture’s Crop Basis Tool to track historical basis patterns in your area as well as keep up with weekly regional changes in corn and soybean basis. The Crop Basis Tool, which is updated weekly, provides access to historical and contemporaneous corn and soybean basis data for crop reporting districts in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan.

One of the keys to improving your corn and soybean marketing skills is learning how to forecast basis. In this video you’ll learn how to use the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture’s Crop Basis Tool to help you generate corn and soybean basis forecasts for your local market region. Research results focused on identifying the optimal moving average forecasting techniques (e.g., 2- vs. 3-year moving averages of basis in your market region) for corn and soybean basis are shared in the video. Additionally, Purdue ag economists Nathan Thompson and James Mintert discuss how to modify your local basis forecasts based on recent basis data for various forecast horizons.

Purdue ag economists Nathan Thompson and James Mintert will help you better understand the basics of two common storage strategies, unpriced storage and storage hedging. You’ll learn how storage hedging provides an opportunity to capture the seasonal increase in basis that occurs during the storage season without speculating on corn or soybean futures prices. The details regarding how to implement, as well as calculate the returns to storage, for each strategy are discussed.

In this video, Purdue ag economists Nathan Thompson and James Mintert examine the historical returns to hedged and unhedged corn and soybean storage. Average returns over the past 30 years are discussed. Importantly, the year-by-year distribution of returns for each strategy are also presented to provide some perspective on the risk-return tradeoffs associated with these two common marketing strategies.

In this video learn how to improve corn storage returns by better understanding seasonality in both futures contract prices and futures contract price spreads. Purdue ag economists Nathan Thompson and James Mintert discuss how to design a corn marketing strategy that maximizes your marketing flexibility and makes it possible for you to take advantage of these seasonal price patterns.