Chris Bennett: Take a decent grain price if it’s on offer
© Johnny Houston The price of grain has varied wildly in the past few years and, as a result, profitability has also varied significantly. How and when we sell our grain has never been a more important, or difficult, decision to make.
Within the past two years, the price of wheat has swung from £350/t to £150/t. If you were clever – or lucky – enough to sell at the right time, there were incredible margins to make.
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It is easy to scrutinise your marketing decisions with the benefit of hindsight, but it is particularly hard not to look back with regret to May 2022 when the wheat price peaked.
Why didn’t we sell everything we could then? What were we waiting for? And if it happened again would we do anything differently?
Farmers are optimists; if we weren’t we wouldn’t keep farming. Every time we plant a crop we take a little gamble that the weather will play ball and we’ll end up with something to sell.
It was this optimism, coupled with a belief that food is too cheap, that made us hesitate when the price rose so dramatically.
We all thought: “The price is going up and this time it’ll stay up.” As a result, very few sold much above £300/t and we all know what the price has done since.
The hard lesson I hope we have taken away is when a good price is on offer, we can’t afford to let greed prevent us from selling. We need to take the chance to make a decent margin while we can.
I remember once at a Niab meeting one of the agronomists, Patrick Stephenson, said if the wheat price has a one on the front we are in a bit of trouble, if it has a two we’ll be okay, and if it has a three we’re into tax planning.
Now that the market has become a little more bullish and we are able to get a price in excess of £200/t post-harvest, we should be doing the sensible thing and selling a decent proportion while we have the chance.