As farmers and ranchers look ahead to next year, a big part of planning surrounds marketing. A lot of farmers wait until after harvest, but ag economists say that could be a mistake.
“We see a lot of farms avoiding pre-harvest grain marketing, and there is sort of a seasonal tendency for prices to be higher, on average, prior to harvest than they are at harvest. There’s a benefit to conducting some pre-harvest marketing. We see a significant number of farms - this is not sort of universally true - but a significant number of farms that don’t do much pre-harvest marketing at all. I think that’s a missed opportunity, particularly in the current environment where the winds in grain marketing, if you will, are kind of small, and you kind of need to be able to capture them whenever they come along,” said Joe Janzen.
Janzen says no matter what, it will take something significant to get the markets moving higher.
