FEATURE STORY Grain Corn Marketplace in the New Millennium By Brian Doidge To improve marketing, you must understand several things: the marketing environment for the crops you want to produce; your financial and cash flow needs; your costs of production and marketing; the various marketing tools and alternatives; and how and when to use those tools. Perhaps most importantly you must spend as much time marketing as you do producing. This article deals with the first requirement...improved understanding of the corn marketplace. Three major trends will determine the marketing environment past the year 2000: increased price volatility; increased competition in world markets and subsequent producer reliance on government support; and increased consolidation of ag market players. U.S. agricultural futures markets, anxious to remain price-maker for the world, have attracted large managed trading accounts by offering new products (options on ag futures, serial options, futures on fertilizers, yields, etc.) and by expanding limits on the number of contracts individual accounts can hold. (Full Story)
Features in the August/September 1999 Ontario Corn Producer
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