Farmer's Edge is the producer's guide to profitable grain marketing.  It offers a disciplined, no-nonsense approach to selling grain by focusing on profit instead of price.

This book offers simple, practical advice--there are no complicated strategies or technical terms to  learn.   You'll be introduced to a simple, straightforward plan for consistently selling grain at a profit using familiar marketing alternatives at the local elevator.  The Farmer's Edge is a valuable resource for producers, marketing consultants, educators, and anyone interested in selling grain profitably.

You can read Chapter 1 of Farmer's Edge below.

 
What Are You
Focused On?

The first step on the path to selling better is having specific guidelines regarding how you choose a selling price. Do you have an opinion about what constitutes a good price? If so, do you know how you arrived at that opinion? You need a standard by which you can determine the value of any given price. That standard is profit.

Any price, instead of being arbitrarily judged for how it compares to yesterday’s price, or what somebody thinks tomorrow’s price will be, or any other such vague standard, should be viewed in terms of how much profit it represents.

Without a specific profit goal as the basis of your marketing decisions, it is all too easy to get into the general mindset of "waiting for a good price." That and human nature make it easy to get pulled into a trap; here’s how it works:

As prices begin moving up, excitement kicks in. With no actual number as the definition of a "good price," and no way of judging what the results of selling at any one price will be, it’s only natural to wait for the price to get a little better. The more it goes up, the stronger the desire to wait becomes.

If the price starts going back down, the natural response is to set a mental goal -- decide to sell when the price gets back to whatever it was before it started going down. All too often, the price continues going down, while the seller becomes more and more determined not to sell until it recovers. Eventually, the decision to sell is based on necessity instead of the price level. Of course, if the price does recover at some point, part one of the cycle starts all over again.

Looking at profit instead of price can be very difficult at first, but once the change has been made, it becomes hard to see things any other way. The picture below is a great illustration of this principle. What do you see?

The first thing most people see is a group of five black shapes. If you look at the spaces between the shapes instead of the shapes themselves, though, you can see the word "sell." It’s all in how you look at it. Once you’ve seen the word, it’s hard to go back to looking at the picture as five odd shapes. In much the same way, marketing can take on a new appearance if you look at it differently, and it can become second nature if you stick to it.

This illustration shows how prices can change over several years. Without any specific goal or plan for reaching that goal, this can be a very difficult environment to live in, financially and emotionally.

The unpredictable peaks and valleys that occur from day to day and year to year spell trouble for the unprepared.

A profit-based marketing plan tends to level out the marketing terrain; prices still move around, but they are not so distracting when you have a specific goal in mind. Over time, profit-based marketing will make the marketing environment look like this:

The peaks and valleys are still there, but their impact is less because they are not the center of your attention; they are merely the environment in which you are looking for a specific opportunity.

Without a clear guideline for identifying a good price, your marketing will have no foundation; the standard changes every day, and it is next to impossible to make any kind of selling decision. Once you have established a guideline for measuring prices -- that guideline being the level of profit that any particular price will return to you -- it becomes easier to make logical, thought-out selling decisions.

Profit-based marketing will lead to better long-term financial results than having no plan at all, and, perhaps even more importantly, can eliminate much of the emotional turmoil that comes with the indecision of price-based marketing.