Market your quality

It’s a challenging year to be a grain buyer. Quality is all over the map and a wide array of degrading factors are at play. There’s frost damage, bleaching, sprouting and all sorts of disease issues. Producers have sample bags representing each bin of stored grain and they will be shopping them around looking for the buyer or buyers that can give them the best deal. While grades are supposed to be cast in stone, different buyers have different blending opportunities and they may be serving different end use customers. This isn’t supposed to happen, but something that starts the year as one grade can often improve through the year as buyers better understand what they have to work with and the tolerances of customers are better understood. When a commodity is in short supply, there’s often more leeway on the grade than if the commodity is oversupplied. This year, a lot of money is hinging on marketing decisions related to quality. The weather in October has been a blessing for harvest progress and for getting crops that won’t require as much drying. Poor quality combined with high moisture is a bad combination and that problem isn’t as bad as it might have been. I’m Kevin Hursh.