Grain marketing remains a serious topic, but this third edition tackles the issues with even more relevant information and fun, including strategies, tactics and pricing tools. This book was written for grain producers and ag professionals with a serious interest in grain markets and marketing strategies.
Updated content in 2018! (Including e-book friendly charts and tables.) Despite being excited by and interested in the grain markets, many participants crave a better understanding of them. Now there is a book to deliver that understanding in ways that could help you make money trading grain.Elaine Kub uses her talents for rigorous analysis and clear, approachable communication to offer this 360-degree look at all aspects of grain trading. From the seasonal patterns of modern grain production, to grain futures' utility as an investment asset, to the basis trading practices of the grain industry's most successful companies, Mastering The Grain Markets unveils something for everyone.The key to profitable grain trading, Kub argues, is building knowledge about the fundamental practices of the industry. To demonstrate the paramount importance of such intelligence, she uses anecdotes, clear examples, and her own experiences as a futures broker, market analyst, grain merchandiser, and farmer. The result is an immensely readable book that belongs in the hands of every investor, grain trader, farmer, merchant, and consumer who is interested in how profits are really made.
The Organic Grain Grower is an invaluable resource for both home-scale and commercial producers interested in expanding their resiliency and drop diversity through growing their own grains. Longtime farmer and organic pioneer Jack Lazor covers how to grow and store wheat, barley, oats, corn, dry beans, soybeans, oilseeds, grasses, nutrient-dense forages, and lesser-known cereals. In addition, Lazor argues the importance of integrating grains on the organic farm (not to mention within the local food system) for reasons of biodiversity and whole-farm management. The Organic Grain Grower provides information on wide-ranging topics, from nutrient density and building soil fertility to machinery and grinding grains for livestock rations.--COVER.
Grain Marketing explores the basic principles and concepts of grain marketing and analyzes the futures and options markets, agricultural policy, grain pricing, and grain marketing structures in the United States, Canada, and the European Community. This text helps students understand the world grain system, trains them to use futures and options, and explains how grain is marketed locally and internationally. The world grain industry affects our daily lives in ways both large and small. It influences what we consume for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and provides at least 40 percent of the world's food supply. The U.S. and world grain industry affects our income, our investments, and global politics. As world population and therefore global demand for grain grows, the volume handled by the U.S. grain industry will continue to expand, demanding not only improvement in crop yields but also continued efforts to compete in increasingly sophisticated international markets. This newly revised, fully updated text provides a practical, comprehensive overview of grain marketing that is useful to both the upper-level undergraduate studying agricultural marketing and the professional working in the industry. Grain Marketing blends several approaches to the study of commodity marketing, combining the institutional, functional, market structure, and analytical and behavioral systems approach to grain marketing. The book includes basic background information for newcomers to the subject of agricultural marketing as well as more rigorous treatment of advanced subjects. The books overall plan allows the student to follow the movement of the major grains, corn, wheat, and soybeans from farm production to final consumption. Along the way, it provides a detailed description of the worldwide system, encompassing local and multinational corporations, state agencies and boards, national trade and agricultural policies, and the cash and futures markets that serve this industry.
In this 1999 book, Karl Gunnar Persson surveys a broad sweep of economic history, examining one of the most crucial markets - grain. His analysis allows him to draw more general lessons, for example that liberalization of markets was linked to political authoritarianism. Grain Markets in Europe traces the markets' early regulation, their poor performance and the frequent market failures. Price volatility caused by harvest shocks was of major concern for central and local government because of the unrest it caused. Regulation became obsolete when markets became more integrated and performed better through trade triggered by falling transport costs. Persson, a specialist in economic history, uses insights from development economics, explores contemporary economic thought on the advantages of free trade, and measures the extent of market integration using the latest econometric methods. Grain Markets in Europe will be of value to scholars and students in economic history, social history and agricultural and institutional economics.
Effects of Grain Marketing Systems on Grain Production gives readers valuable insight into the grain marketing and production systems of China and India. Researchers, scholars, and government officials involved in agricultural commodity economics and marketing will be particularly interested in this work, as few studies have focused on the agriculture of China and India, and even fewer on their grain industries. The grain issue is of crucial importance in China and India, since they are the two most populous countries in the world. In Effects of Grain Marketing Systems on Grain Production, Author Zhang-Yue Zhou investigates and analyzes the effects of these countries'grain marketing systems on grain production over the past four decades using expert surveys, farm-level surveys, and qualitative analyis of national aggregate data. He sets the stage for future research in this important field as he gives you specific information about: the minimum price support scheme grain procurement methods grain production subsidies government reserve stocks market infrastructures grain movement between regions non-government marketing channels supply responsesThe study's three-step procedure lessens bias, and its cross-checked results further strengthen the validity of its findings. The information presented in Effects of Grain Marketing Systems on Grain Production helps professionals at research institutes, universities, and government agencies, especially those emphasising Indian, Chinese, or Asian food economics, understand agricultural economics in developing countries. The book is also useful as a supplemental text for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate classes on Chinese and Indian economies and agricultural commodity economics in developing countries.
This report addresses the overarching question regarding the role of institutions in enhancing market development following market reforms. It uses the New Institutional Economics framework to empirically analyze the role of a specific market institution, that of brokers acting as intermediaries to match traders in the Ethiopian grain market in reducing the transaction costs of search faced by traders. Brokers play a key role in facilitating exchange in a weak marketing environment where limited public market information, the lack of grain standardization, oral contracts, and weak legal enforcement of contracts increase the risk of contract failure. Relying on primary data, it analyzes traders' microeconomic behavior, social capital, the nature and extent of their transaction costs, and the norms and rules governing the relationship between brokers and traders.The study uses an innovative approach to quantify the costs of search and demonstrates that the brokerage institution is economically efficient both for individual traders and for global economic welfare.