Marketing Update: Continued Discussion Of “Market Carry” And How It Can Be Used

Sep 10, 2015

By John Berry

Two weeks ago the marketing article brought up the concept of "market carry". Grain marketers should be doing the math using current harvest price bids as warm-up for doing these same calculation for-real at harvest.

What is “carry?” For a little background on carry and the simple method to calculate if any available carry is more than your cost of storage; refer to this previous article.

What is the market telling us today about carry for our 2015 corn and soybeans? To figure this out we go straight to the CME for today’s quotes and find the following:

Corn

DEC15 is 367 and JUL16 is 390
This gives a carry of $0.23

Using the math referred to in the above article; as of today corn has a “large” carry more than compensating us for the cost of interest on stored corn. When we have a large carry an appropriate marketing decision is to store the crop setting a price for grain at a later delivery time frame.

There are at least two pricing tools we can use to sell the carry;

We could make a cash forward contract with our normal cash buyer by agreeing on a quantity, price and storage time frame,
We could sell a futures contract (hedge) against grain in storage.

Soybeans

NOV15 is 873 and JUL16 is 882
This gives a carry of $0.09

This is not a large carry. The market is not offering much of a return to our storage enterprise, and in this case we wouldn’t even cover our interest costs if we sold the soybean carry.

When we do not have a large carry at harvest there are two appropriate marketing strategies to consider;

sell the crop off the combine,
store the crop unpriced.

Remember to set your exit strategy if you decide to store unpriced (no price protection). You should be able to tell your farm management team a combination of what price you are waiting for as well as when you believe the best time to sell has passed.

As we all know; nothing is 100% so using carry to assist our marketing choices for any un-committed bushels can leave money on the table. However, it can also generate revenues in excess of what we anticipated. Nobody knows for certain what the future may bring. All we can do is use some farm management decision making concepts and make choices appropriate for our individual farm needs and expectations.

Source:psu.edu

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.