Before it starts, on one page, or the buyer’s call decides it for you. A written selling plan, which grain markets call a marketing plan and which is the same document under either name, buys no better price and no better year. What it buys is a decision somebody can check afterwards, because the channel and the trigger for each tranche were written while nothing was yet at stake, with a date on the page.
The decision usually happens on the phone, with the screen price on one side and the week’s mood on the other. Nothing was written before the cycle saying which channel the production leaves through, in how many tranches it leaves, or what has to be true for each tranche to go, so at the end there is nothing to hold the selling against. The argument that follows is about whether the price was good, and it has no referee. The next cycle repeats it, since no record of a pattern was left behind.
What the plan does not promise
Not a better price, and the guide that teaches the sheet says so before it teaches the sheet. O’Brien, writing for Kansas State University in 2000, summarises a study of Kansas Farm Management Association farms over 1989 to 1998 which found that differences in yield, in cost of production, in how early a farm took up no-till and in profit held from farm to farm more consistently than differences in selling price.
What separated one farm from another most durably was what it grew and what that cost. Selling price was the difference that held least. The guide draws the conclusion itself, that a crop has to be efficiently produced before it can be effectively marketed, and that it is not an easy task for farmers to obtain better than average results in marketing their grain.
That study is not evidence about planning, and the guide is honest about the gap. It assumed every farm in it approached marketing the same way and never recorded whether any of them worked from a written plan. It shows where farms differ from one another. It says nothing about what changes when one of them writes something down.
Why the good price you are waiting for keeps moving
Because it is assembled out of the prices you have just seen. Mattos and Poirier ran a marketing simulation with 75 grain producers across southern Manitoba in 2012, on paper, about 25 minutes each, asking at every step what price they were holding out for. The number they gave was shaped mostly by an average of the last two prices they had seen and by the highest price reached so far in the window.
The day’s price counted for less than either. The year’s low counted the other way round: the lower it went, the higher the number they held out for, which the authors offer as producers trying to make the loss back. The number also drifted, rising more readily than it fell, and falling as the months passed whichever way the market went.
Two of their results describe the phone call. Producers who expected the price to climb over the coming month sold less, and producers who had brought their own number down toward the market sold more. The authors hold the finding where it belongs: 75 volunteers already close to their provincial farm service, and a simulation rather than real sales, run on invented price runs of which half rose and half fell. They add a limitation of their own, that the real market was in a strong price uptrend during the weeks the interviews ran, which may have carried into the numbers producers gave. It describes how the number behaves, not what anyone lost.
The two goals that cannot both be served
Price and stability pull against each other, and the page has to say which one it serves. O’Brien states the trade-off without softening it: it is difficult if not impossible to consistently accomplish both of the goals of price enhancement and price risk reduction over time, because marketing strategies expected to result in less variable, annual crop revenue are also expected to result in lower revenue.
Selling equal parts at intervals removes the chance of hitting the year’s low and removes the chance of beating the average in the same movement, and the guide’s defense of it is not the price it produces. Such strategies may have merit if they are used to add structure and discipline to a marketing plan.
A plan that never chose between the two can justify any outcome after the event. Sold early into a rally, it was risk management. Sold late into a slide, it was going for the price. One line at the top of the page removes both defences, and it costs nothing to write while nothing is yet priced. That is what the planning axis means by a standard: written before the work starts, and the same for everybody who reads it afterwards.
What is actually on the sheet
Seven blocks. The first five are the plan and get written before anything is sold; the last two are filled in as the year runs. The worksheet published with the Kansas State guide is a form rather than advice, and every line of it has a blank beside it.
| Block on the Kansas State worksheet | What it asks you to write |
|---|---|
| Essential information | Name, crop, expected production, the period the plan covers, the date the plan was developed, five blanks for scheduled review dates, and what share of total sales is meant to go before harvest, at harvest and after it |
| Price goals | The criteria the goal rests on, and the goal itself as a price per unit |
| Market prices, outlook and price trend expectations | Quoted prices on a dated day, the location each cash price was quoted at, the factors expected to move them, and in which direction |
| Marketing strategy | The tool, the quantity, the price goal and the time period for each move |
| Stop-loss intervention levels and contingency plans | The level that forces the plan to change, and what replaces it when it is reached |
| Evaluating performance | The goal, the price actually received, and the difference between the two |
| Comments on progress and performance | Dated notes, one per review |
The last two blocks are the ones this page cannot teach, because they are filled in after the selling rather than before it. Evaluating performance asks for the goal, the price actually received and the difference between the two, and getting the middle term right is arithmetic over the settlement documents rather than a matter of recollection. How that total is built, and how the executed share of each tranche is set beside the declared one, is the sales against the plan.
The third block is where the channel gets named, and it is the easiest line on the sheet to read past. The form asks for a location beside each cash price, which is asking which counter the production leaves through, and a trigger written without it fires at a price nobody can go and take. Quoted prices on a dated day is one line lifted out of the price record, and the plan borrows that line rather than keeping it: the series it comes from is fed weekly, somewhere else, by whoever reads the quote.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension compresses the front half into four steps in the same order: work out expected production and cost of production, set the horizon the plan will cover, set the pricing objectives, then set goals against them. Expected production is where the sheet stops being a marketing document. The volume comes out of a multi-year production plan, and the price the plan aims at has to be the same figure as a declared price assumption in the budget, or one of the two is wrong and nobody has noticed.
Price trigger, calendar trigger, or both
Three shapes, and the sheet holds whichever one you pick. Maples and Sanderson, writing for Mississippi State University Extension in 2025, set them out for beginners. The target version fixes four pricing targets, at the break-even price and at 10, 20 and 30 percent above it, and prices 20 percent of expected production at each.
The timed version prices the same 20 percent blocks on four fixed dates, the first week of each of four consecutive months ahead of harvest, with those months set by the crop calendar of the region that publication covers, so a reader anywhere else counts the same four dates back from his own harvest. The hybrid reverts to the timed dates whenever a target goes unmet, so that 80 percent is priced by harvest.
Each of those triggers is a goal with a number and a deadline narrowed down to a single decision, which is why a trigger written as “when the price is right” fails the same way a goal written as “grow more” fails. Somebody has to be able to read it at nine in the morning and know whether it fired.
The share the plan leaves uncommitted on purpose
At least a fifth, and this is the number worth copying whatever the farm produces. All three shapes in the Mississippi State publication leave at least 20 percent of expected production unpriced, to account for production uncertainty due to weather or other risks, helping to avoid the financial consequences of being over-hedged in a lower-yielding year. A plan that commits everything is not a bolder plan. It is a plan that has quietly assumed a yield, or a weight, that nobody has measured yet. That fifth is only checkable once the volume already priced has been counted on one sheet, because the share left uncommitted is a subtraction and not an intention.
The benchmark decides whether the year was good
Pick it afterwards and it will flatter you. Dietz, Aulerich, Irwin and Good examined wheat sold by Illinois and Kansas farmers over 1982 to 2004 and found the same sales scoring three different ways depending on what they were held against: about level with the market on a 24 or 20 month benchmark, a little above it on a 12 month benchmark, and below it against the harvest price. Nothing about the selling changed between those three readings. Only the line it was measured against did.
The same paper takes down the oldest line in the trade, that farmers market two-thirds of the crop in the bottom third of the price range. Farmer prices landed in the middle third of the crop year’s range, not the bottom third, about half to three-quarters of the time. The problem is not that farms sell at the bottom. The problem is that they are judged, afterwards, against whichever benchmark the conversation reaches for, and the price goal criteria line at the top of the Kansas State sheet is the field that settles it in advance. It is also the field most likely to be left empty.
Why the sheet asks for five review dates
Five, because a plan reviewed once is a plan that expired without telling anyone. The Kansas State worksheet asks for the date the plan was written and then five more for scheduled reviews, and it explains why: naming specific dates is meant to encourage sellers to periodically review and update their marketing plans to allow such plans to become dynamic decision-making processes rather than onetime exercises, because plans left alone may either provide poor direction to marketers or become irrelevant in light of changing market conditions.
Wisconsin Extension states the same requirement from the other side: your plan must be flexible and able to be adapted when market conditions change and price objectives are not met. Booking them is the same move as a scheduled review date on the goals, and it fails for the same reason when nobody is named to call it.
Who is allowed to act on a trigger
One named person, and none of the three extension sources read for this article asks for it. The Kansas State sheet does ask, before the first sale, for the level that would force the plan to be abandoned and for the plan that takes its place once that level is reached, which is as close as any of them comes.
What none of them asks is the field that decides whether any of this survives a Tuesday morning: who can act on a trigger without calling anybody first. Write that name beside each trigger. A trigger that needs a meeting is a suggestion, and the market will have moved before the meeting sits. Naming it is where the four functions of management stop being a diagram and turn into somebody with authority to act on a page that already exists.
What having no plan looks like from the outside
It looks like holding everything. Janzen, working from the records of Illinois farms that keep their books with the state farm business association, covering corn and soybeans from 2004 to 2019, found that more than 40 percent of farms sold none of that year’s crop before the first of January, a share running between 30 and 50 percent depending on the year.
What happened to grain held past January varied enormously between farms in the same year and the same crop, by at least 10 percentage points across the bulk of the distribution and often far more, with some farms 20 to 30 points below the best performers. The median farm came out behind by waiting in 6 of the 16 years.
Those farms keep books with the association by choice, so this describes the ones who keep books rather than every farm in the state, and the return figure only exists for farms that sold something near harvest, which leaves out precisely the farms in the paragraph above. The reading survives that. Holding everything is a position, it was the most common position on those records, and it was never written anywhere. A position nobody declared cannot be reviewed, and it gets taken again next cycle without anyone deciding to take it.
Where to start
An hour and a half, with the sales records of the last two cycles on the table. None of it needs a broker, a platform or a price forecast.
Most farms do not have a bad selling decision. They have an unmarked one, which is a different problem and a more comfortable one, because a decision nobody wrote down never turns out to have been wrong. It never turns out to have been right either, and that is the half that costs something. The next cycle opens with the same blank page and the same buyer, plus a memory of a price that felt good at the time, which is the one number here shown to move on its own.