Ag Over Easy Podcast

Amity Shedd:
Ag Over Easy is the new podcast from channel where you get breakfast with a side of agronomic insights. Enjoy some food for thought while you get fresh takes on different topics from a wide range of farm industry experts. Coming soon to channel podcasting.com and Apple podcasts, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen.

Hi, there. Welcome back to Channel Chat, Season Two. I'm your host, Amity Shedd, and we're in Wahoo, Nebraska for this episode, visiting with Channel Seedsman, Colby Woods, in his Sentara Sales and Training Specialist, Jessica Grubbs. Colby has been a Seedsman for almost two years now, and for the last few months he's been working with Jessica to learn how to fly a drone and use the Sentara software to scout his farmer's fields. We actually got to see the drone in action when we're out there to record the podcast and it's actually pretty cool. It's pretty amazing what these little machines can do. Jessica is an expert on the Sentera software. It is super educated on drones now and what the future could hold for the smart flying machines. Let's go ahead and get this conversation started.

Today. We're in Wahoo, Nebraska with Channel Seedsman, Colby Woods, and Sales and Training Specialist for Sentera, Jessica Grubbs. Welcome, you guys. Thanks for taking time today to come talk to us.

Colby Woods:
You bet.

Jessica Grubbs:
Thank you.

Amity Shedd:
Let's start off with some introductions. Jessica, since you're the lady, if you would like to start off.

Jessica Grubbs:
I work for Sentera. I get the joy of selling and educating people on the technology that drones have and then also training them how to do it.

Amity Shedd:
Sentera, can you explain or talk a little bit about that company?

Jessica Grubbs:
I can, so Sentera is world known for their sensors, so their NDVI and DRE sensors, so crop health sensors. With those sensors, we've built out analytics products so that you can do more than just crop health. You can do stand counts, which is kind of what Colby was really focused on, and weed density maps. We continue to build out software to help farmers.

Amity Shedd:
You help Colby.

Colby Woods:
Yeah. One day I got an email from Sentera that they were offering a certain package and got in contact with Jessica. Now we're learning and going every day, something new with the drone. Yeah, it's been fun and exciting.

Amity Shedd:
How long ago was that?

Colby Woods:
That would have been, gosh, I think, right around April because May, I think, is when I did my first drone flight.

Amity Shedd:
April this year?

Colby Woods:
Yeah. Yep.

Amity Shedd:
Okay. You two have worked together since that point? How's it going?

Jessica Grubbs:
I think it's gone pretty good.

Colby Woods:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amity Shedd:
Good. That is your job, am I correct, of traveling around and training? Who do you work with? Who's your clientele?

Jessica Grubbs:
Yep. Seedsman, CCAs in general, any agronomist that's out there.

Amity Shedd:
How often are you down here working with Colby?

Jessica Grubbs:
Person to person, I think we've been together twice.

Colby Woods:
Yeah.

Jessica Grubbs:
Most of the time it's a steady stream of text and call.

Colby Woods:
Yeah.

Amity Shedd:
Yes. It sounds similar to your farmers calling you. It's like she's your Seedsman only.

Colby Woods:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I say, yeah, [crosstalk 00:03:28] sometimes it's a lot of questions and it's, "Have you called support yet?" "No, I'll just call you first, right? Why would I call support when I can call you?"

Jessica Grubbs:
Right. Right.

Amity Shedd:
Good. That's a good relationship. Obviously, you've learned a lot from her. What has she taught you? Did she teach you drone 101? Have flown a drone before?

Colby Woods:
Yeah. No.

Amity Shedd:
Is this completely new to you?

Colby Woods:
Messing with the field agent, which is the software that Sentara offers for the scouting, the drone really kind of flies itself. You set up the field boundaries where you want it, and you tell it the job or the type of flight you want it to fly, and it kind of does it for you. That part was pretty easy. Yeah. Like I said, she came over. We did the flight 101 and then went through how to use the software because basically it's all imagery. It's all on a mini SD card. That's in the drone. Yeah. Honestly, it's been pretty easy to learn. Yeah, I was very intimidated to begin with flying a drone.

Amity Shedd:
Yeah.

Colby Woods:
I don't want to wreck this. I'm like, "How durable are they?"

Amity Shedd:
Right.

Colby Woods:
She's like, "Well, you don't want to run it directly into a tree."

Amity Shedd:
How did the first flight go?

Colby Woods:
It was good. It was good. Basically, we flew it around here at home without the actual software, but while using the software, it was pretty easy. We set it to 400 feet and it took off and did probably, what, an acre worth.

Jessica Grubbs:
Yeah, we did a soccer field here in town.

Colby Woods:
Yeah, a soccer field. We did a soccer field and it flew that. It took all of four minutes, but it's neat to kind of see how that works.

Amity Shedd:
Yeah.

Colby Woods:
Yeah. It's almost like a video game, kind of say.

Amity Shedd:
Yeah.

Colby Woods:
It's pretty.

Amity Shedd:
It's got the controller and all that stuff.

Colby Woods:
Yeah. Yep.

Amity Shedd:
Yeah.

Colby Woods:
Then it has a screen, so you can see where you're flying. If you kind of at least have some hand eye coordination, it's pretty easy to figure out.

Amity Shedd:
Yeah. Yeah. Why did you make the choice to go ahead through with learning all this stuff? What benefit does it bring your customers and your farmers?

Colby Woods:
We kind of want to be on the front end of this because I think drones are going to start showing up more and more in agriculture and especially in our scouting because it's that idea of getting a hundred percent coverage of the acres. When we walk by foot, yeah, a guy could walk a majority of a field and get a good idea what's going on, but with the drones, we can cover a hundred percent of the acres. What, an 80 acre field takes 20 minutes to fly. You're saving time there. You're getting a snapshot, actual live data out in the grower's hands of what's going on in that field.

Like I said, it doesn't take much time at all. It's being more efficient. It's giving farmers the information and data that they need to make on time decisions throughout the growing season. That was a big part of it. Like I said, I kind of want to be the first one out there. I want to be out there before a lot of the other guys are, so that was kind of another factor. Honestly, Nebraska summers get hot and walking cornfields in ... isn't all that fun.

Amity Shedd:
I see, right.

Colby Woods:
That's another perk.

Amity Shedd:
I get it. This particular area, what's different, interesting, or maybe even harder about farming in Eastern Nebraska specifically? What's the benefit of having a drone to help you through that, too?

Colby Woods:
In Eastern Nebraska, we got kind of a little bit of everything. There's dry land farmers. Then we do have irrigation around. Yeah. We see everything. We have basically all the pests. We get all the diseases, so just having the drone out there to scout, to make my time more efficient on the farm, get the data back, we can kind of keep on top of things.

Amity Shedd:
Jessica, drones weren't always around and they weren't always used for this purpose. How have you seen that change in your business? How popular is using this kind of technology now?

Jessica Grubbs:
Yeah, so kind of similar to Colby, I came from a co op where we had a drone. The main purpose of the drone was, if something went wrong, the drone went out to see from the sky what was going on. That was literally the only thing you did with it. To come in now and have a whole mission plan, and it goes out, and it pretty much does everything it needs to do, and comes back to you, that's way simpler than even what we had before. I continue to see improvements, even in the flight planning and different things like obstacle avoidance and things like that, to make it easier to do.

The thing I see is the software. How much more can you do with it? The drone goes out, and flies, and makes it easy, but what do you do with it when it comes back to you? Stand counts are the big part of what Colby does with his business. Weed pressure is becoming more popular.

There's a lot of things you're not thinking about that you could be doing with that drone. We have guys doing residue management, so they'll fly it. They'll see how much residue there is and do a prescription tillage off of it. Crop health makes different prescriptions, so you can go out for potash, or nitrogen, or other things along those lines. There's just a whole slew of software solutions that you could be using on your farm or even just for your customers to have more data points and more actionable things to do.

Amity Shedd:
What has the general reaction been from your farmers and farmers you've dealt with when they use a drone for the first time or as they start to incorporate that on their fields?

Colby Woods:
I would say they're very curious. Like I said, I've had a couple of guys ...

Colby Woods:
I would say they're very curious. I said, I've had a couple of guys that pull up when I'm flying the field and they're wondering what I'm doing. Just standing on the edge of the field, looking up in the sky. And then I show them the remote and the iPad, the screen of what's going on. So yeah. So they're very intrigued. I think that they're happy that I'm the one doing it and not them because they don't quite trust themselves to do it. But they also like the information they're getting back, the data.

I mean, that's nowadays farmers they're getting more and more information and they need more information on decisions they're making. So I said, they're intrigued by it. They like it. Like I said, they like the data that's coming from the flights that we do. So I think that's probably where they're accepting it more. No one's really been against it or freaked out by it at all. I said, they all said they like it. The more and more they see it, they understand what it is and they appreciate it because like I said, yeah, you are getting over all of their acres in a timely fashion. So like I said, I think it's going to change the way we scout going forward.

Amity Shedd:
Do you get the same, I guess impression from farmers you work with? Or that's kind of your job, I guess, is to make them more comfortable using the drones, right?

Jessica Grubbs:
That's right. Nobody showed up with a shotgun yet to shoot it out the sky, so all bonuses. But yeah, I get a lot of the same reaction. What are you doing at the field edge looking at the sky? And you show them and they're like, "Wow, that's really cool. I didn't realize you could do that with a drone or I didn't realize how much time does it take you?" Or as a CCA, you think about all right, I can go out and I can scan a field and I can do three to five spots and that's only three to five spots in 80 acres. If I can do a whole field in the same amount of time, that's a bigger advantage for that grower versus my random checks. You know?

Amity Shedd:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So Colby, you kind of touched on it with it's more information and farmers use it to make decisions, how much information and technology is too much? I know it's a different way to think about it, but when you think they have their own intuition about what they want to do and they get advice from their season or whoever, how do you guys help them sort through all that to make the best decision for the farm because it's a lot?

Colby Woods:
Yeah. I don't think we're quite there. I know what you mean by too much information. But like I said, yeah, I could tell a guy all these things about a certain corn hybrid, what it does, but really they want to know placement. On my acre, where's it going to go? Where does it fit best? And so when we get that, and then we use these tools, with the drones and scouting, and it's just to support where we place these hybrids. Did we place it in the right spot? Is it doing good? Is it the plant health the way we want it? We can look at other factors throughout the year. We know mother nature can be basically one of our biggest factors, depending on how things grow.

So I said, yeah I use it a lot too when we're doing field health. We've made decisions and recommendations on when to fertilize. We've noticed that the corn crop wasn't doing as well as we want, so we gave it an extra shot of fertilizer through the growing season. And then we go out and fly the drone, maybe a couple of days afterwards and you could see the health of the plant increase. So they see that as a positive because they don't have to wait all the way until it yields. Before we would, are we doing the right thing? Well, we can actually see in the imagery that yes, the field health, the plant is increased in health. So therefore, we're getting bang for our buck.

Amity Shedd:
Right.

Colby Woods:
And like I said, guys will tell you when they've had too much information or what they're looking for really. I mean, you just got to ask the right questions. There's some guys that want everything. They want all the maps, all the stand counts. There are some guys that want a couple of fields that are maybe their best fields. So it just depends on grower to grower, what they want and so they'll tell you. So that's what I see.

Amity Shedd:
What do you see, Jessica?

Jessica Grubbs:
I see no such thing as too much information. When I make a prescription, I'm always like, "Give me everything you have even if you think it was a bad year, I want to see it. I want to see how the soil types reacted to different situations. I want to see anything I can learn to try to help you make a better decision for next year." So I've never felt like there's too much information, but that's just me.

Colby Woods:
It's got to be the right information. There could be a lot of other stuff, but I mean, like Jessica said, there's a lot of farmers that you look at it at certain things, you want to have all the clues, you want to have all what's going on when trying to diagnose a problem. If the more information, the more things you have, we'll be able to get better. We might've been right about in the 70% getting things right. Well now we could probably be closer to that 90, 95% getting things right.

Amity Shedd:
Right. So how do you guys help bridge that gap between farmers who are intimidated by the technology and the drone and don't want to break it and don't really want to touch it. Are you that bridge? Are you bridging that gap?

Colby Woods:
Like I said, the guy I'm letting him know that it's easier than he thinks. I don't let it intimidate him. And then you just reassure him. Like you use a lot of these guys have the climate, the iPad in the cab, they're out doing other things. Heck they can run sprayers, they can run combines and planters that have screens all over the place. I'm like, it's no different than that. They're confident in that. It's just getting them to try it. So when you let them know that, "Oh yeah I am doing all of these other things it's like, yeah, like find a drone, it won't be..." And I said, "If you want I'll help you. We can learn together, so to say," because that's what I've done this year.

So this year has been my first year learning what the Sentera software can all do, going out just flying guys fields, getting an idea what it does. And then next year I'll probably start offering it more as a full on farm service for these guys. I said, this year, I'm Guinea pig in it and just trying to figure out how it all works, getting all the bugs figured out. But I said by next year, really getting into it. So yeah. So I tell them I'm learning too. So, yeah.

Amity Shedd:
Yeah. What do you think about that, Jessica? Especially since you are a training specialist, helping these guys wrap their minds around this drone technology.

Jessica Grubbs:
I am a bridge.

Amity Shedd:
You're a bridge as well.

Jessica Grubbs:
Like he said, look at the tractors now. They all are like iPad function. It's very similar. So I always say the drone is the least sexy part of the whole thing because you literally give it a boundary and it goes and does it and comes back. It's very boring to be honest. It's not intimidating because it's hard to mess it up.

Amity Shedd:
Yeah. It's so cool how technology has come this far. Why is drone technology and software like Sentera needed and important today?

Jessica Grubbs:
I think it's needed and important because it's really nice that climate offers satellite imagery. But when I look at ag today, look at RTK level accuracy and you look at sub inch. You're down to the less than an inch of accuracy of where you're placing the seed, where you're placing those nutrients. So satellite imagery can be 30 meters off. I mean, it can be monstrous amounts off. So when you're looking at getting down to that level of accuracy, you need to be able to fly it and have really accurate GPS and really accurate crop health mastery. You know what you're doing. So that's where I think drones have their place, just in increasing that accuracy.

And then the other part of it is right now. We need to do things right now. Like he said, putting fertilizer out. That's not something you can wait until the cloud covers gone or until the climate map kicks back. You need to do it now if you notice a problem.

Amity Shedd:
So the future, what do you think about it?

Jessica Grubbs:
I see more automation. I mean, we hear about Amazon working on drones, delivering our stuff. So we're just moving in that direction. I see more automation that way. And then the other thing I see is not only having the drone automatically do a lot of this for you. I see live streaming coming back to the equipment as it's going. So I could almost see the drone flying over and sending back a prescription lifetime to the machine as it's going.

Amity Shedd:
That's cool.

Colby Woods:
That and they say with that the future, you see a lot of guys, especially around here, we put a lot of fungicide on corn and beans. I can see application becoming a thing with drones. Because the drone I fly probably couldn't do it or it would take a lot of time to do a field. It's a little one, but some of these bigger drones, I could see them applying herbicides, fungicides, even like spot spraying. So doing that, which I'm sure will come because-

Jessica Grubbs:
There's drones out there that do that now.

Colby Woods:
Yeah.

Jessica Grubbs:
You can buy a drone that'll actually spray your field for you.

Amity Shedd:
Wow.

Colby Woods:
So, yeah, so I mean.

Jessica Grubbs:
... buy a drone that will actually spray your field for you.

Amity Shedd:
Wow.

Colby Woods:
So, yeah. So, I mean, that's something where, gosh, probably save equipment costs too. And even so if you're not-

Jessica Grubbs:
Yeah. I think the spraying drone now is around $16,000.

Colby Woods:
Yeah.

Jessica Grubbs:
Which is peanuts compared to the price of a ground rig.

Colby Woods:
Yep. And incidentally, I've heard that it almost does, and this might be wrong, but does a better penetration because of the propeller. It pushes it actually down into, kind of like when a helicopter sprays. It pushes the chemical that are the fungicide or whatever it is down into the canopy, so. But, yeah. I mean, it's, it'll be interesting to see, like I said, I'm excited to kind of get more into it. The imagery is just going to get better and better. I think it's right now it's kind of almost endless and kind of, it seems like a fantasy, but I mean, it's coming to life too, so.

Amity Shedd:
Right. It's cool. Yeah. Do you have a specific customer or farm that is a good example of how the drone technology really helped them improve their crop or their field conditions or anything like that?

Colby Woods:
Yeah. I have, like I said, I'm running on two guys this year. And I actually got this idea by talking with Jessica and the other people at Sentera is we had a late planted corn crop, just because of the weather conditions, and it's on a bottom. So we went in and we could kind of tell the field was a little bit behind. So we went in and added some fertilizer in and then also did an application of fungicide just to kind of keep the hill plant health up and everything. So what Jessica and Sentera said, "Hey, let's go fly this field before he decides to put anything on it. Just to get that field out the imagery, show the guy and then show him before and after."

Then we flew it, what, 10 days, I think, after the fungicide application and they came back and the green spots were greener, the bad spots that they shrunk down. So a guy's seeing his return on investment on the fungicide before even going to harvest. Because mostly we would have to wait until harvest like, "Okay, maybe it did or was it other factors?" Where you can see within 10 days that, "Yeah. That fungicide really made a difference."

So doing things like that. Yeah. I was able to fly a field of beans for another guy and just by, did field health on it. But then also looking at the actual photos that come back, that it snapshots, you could see that the canopy was really eaten up by, it was a thistle caterpillar that was coming through and you could really tell.

So we, that was right away, I told him, "Don't even wait" because there's a certain stage of the beans. They want us to apply it. But I told him, "We probably won't even get to that stage if we didn't spray it." So yeah, we went out and they applied the insecticide on it. It helped, I mean it knocked down all the caterpillars. Now the field looks normal for all things considered. So, but yeah, I mean, that was kind of a neat thing to see is the actual, I guess, what do they call it Jess? Is it just the RGB photo?

Jessica Grubbs:
The color photo?

Colby Woods:
Yeah. The color photo. Yeah.

Jessica Grubbs:
Yeah. For RGB.

Colby Woods:
So it was just a color photo. We had the field health and there was the spots that showed up, but then you could filter and look at the RGB map of it and it just shows a true color of what the map is and you can zoom in pretty close and it shows you how torn up or eaten up the canopy was. Yeah. It's pretty neat to see how close you can actually get. Because you said that you can think about it. The drones are only flying, 20 feet above the canopy or so. So yeah, it does. It does a great job. So that was, that was probably two examples of using the drone were it actually helped with an in season application where guys are-

Amity Shedd:
That's great.

Colby Woods:
Yeah,

Amity Shedd:
Yeah. And invaluable time-saving like you said, you're not having to wait all the way until harvest to see if something was successful or not or helped or not. Yeah.

Jessica Grubbs:
I did the thistle caterpillars. It's funny. You said that because I did the exact same thing the other day. I had seen we'd had first flush in July, in the beginning of July. And then we just had another flush of this'll caterpillars come through. So it's funny you say that. Because I just went out and did a couple of flights for that the other day.

Amity Shedd:
Wow. That's neat. This is so interesting. How tough is it being a farmer today and how do you guys help?

Colby Woods:
I think, today it's... I like to help farmers. I don't know if I'd want to be a farmer, just because like I said, they said they have a lot of things they have to worry about. Between where the markets are, the mother nature kind of decides what their final product's going to be usually. And I said, they're making a lot of decisions and it's more, I would say business oriented now than it ever has been. These guys are, the banks are getting a little tighter or the insurance companies, they want more information. The good old boy system is kind of going away where you, need to have all this information.

So I think it's our responsibility as agronomists and a partner with the farmers to give them as much information to make these decisions, as we kind of talked earlier, that they can't. So that's where, like Jess said, I don't think there's too much information, probably isn't a thing. Because the decisions they have to make, at the end it's all up to them, but we can hopefully help get them to make the right one, so.

Amity Shedd:
Right. And as farming maybe gets more difficult, there's also more, the advances in technology are kind of counteracting that a little bit, maybe, to make it a little easier. What do you think?

Jessica Grubbs:
I'm going to throw it all the way to Precision Ag in general, is just going to help any farmer today because return on investment is so important and knowing where your breakevens are, is the most important thing that a farmer can do right now. Just because if they don't know where their breakeven is, they don't know how much it's going to cost them to do that. They don't know how much fertilizer, that fungicide is going to cost them. They need to know where they're at and they need to know, inch by inch across their field, "Maybe this part is not returning it's investment. Maybe I should plant a CRP and say to heck with it."

Those are things that they need to be considering. And maybe it's a lower stand count that they need to do or maybe it's just something that they need to change the way they've done it always because they have to adapt to the climate we're in now.

Amity Shedd:
Now I kind of want to talk about just a little bit on your background in ag and why you got involved in drone technology.

Jessica Grubbs:
When I look at how I ended up in my role, I look at, I became a CCA because I really liked helping farmers and I liked scouting fields and I liked the science of it. And I look at Precision Ag is like the next level of that. I look at what's the next piece that you can really help a grower with. So when I came to Sentera, that was a huge part of it was we are offering a really great product that can help farmers better their farm and better their family life. And that's what I wanted out of a job. So I think Sentera is a good fit just in that, it's kind of that next level of adding value for the grower.

Amity Shedd:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Colby Woods:
Yeah. I said, I started at the university in business thinking that's what I want to do. And it got halfway through the freshman year and I was like, "I can't do this, hey." And so, I got into agronomy. And it's funny because a lot of people are like, "What'd you graduate with?" I'm like, "Agronomy degree." They're like "What's agronomy?" And I'm like, "It's the science behind farming." And so, it's kind of...

And like I say, it really intrigued me. And then I got out of school, worked for a co-op and did a lot of scouting, but then was always interested in the seed. The seed for me, I always liked the seed because that's kind of where it starts. It's kind of, when we talk about the chicken or the egg, but I, seeds kind of where it starts.

So I kind of always had the passion for the seed part of it. And honestly coming over to Channel just made sense just because I feel them as a company, they're probably one of the more progressive companies. And me being a younger guy and like Jessica said with the precision and how things are going, where ag industry is going, I think Channel was right in line with all that going forward. They're very customer focused. Our whole platform, what we do is kind of based around the field checkup series, seedsmanship at work, kind of always being on the farm with the farmer. And I said the whole way in partnering with Sentera kind of the same, all part of it. It's just part of another tool in the toolbox to help farmers.

Amity Shedd:
Right. I normally like to end on kind of a lighter question of like, why do you love your job?

Colby Woods:
I would say, I do what I do just because I just love the ag industry. I believe what farmers do is very important. They feed the world so that's a big part of it and just, it seems like we're all kind of everybody in the ag industry is almost like a big family. There's other companies, you have your competitors and stuff, but at the same time, we're all in it for the farmer we hope we are. So that's kind of why do what I do, so.

Jessica Grubbs:
I love working at Sentera just because it is kind of that bridge between technology and Ag today. I grew up on a farm and I remember riding a 10/86 with my dad and hitting my head on the roof of it every time we bounced across anything. And I think back to that, I'm like, "Wow, we have come so far from the days of bonking your head on the window to..."

Amity Shedd:
Right?

Jessica Grubbs:
...your head on the window to...

Amity Shedd:
Right.

Jessica Grubbs:
To tractors that drive themselves and drones that are flying overhead and giving you prescriptions on where to be applying stuff. I do it because it's exciting. It's exciting to see where we're going. It's exciting to see how we can help people get to those levels of accuracy.

Amity Shedd:
Well, thanks you guys for joining us today. Really appreciate it. And we'll catch you next time on the next episode of Channel Chat.

It was really fun and I learned a lot talking to Colby and Jessica about drones and their place in a farmer's field. They both agree that the technology is available, the opportunity for more information is there and it can only help farmers make more informed decisions faster, which hopefully means a better chance for their success. Now let's send it over to grain marketing consultant, Matt Bennett, who's going to talk us through some strategies to consider when it comes to grain marketing.

Matt Bennett:
This is Matt Bennett, Channel's grain marketing consultant, continuing a series of different marketing topics that we're trying to cover this year, trying to help producers out because obviously there's a lot of challenges, especially in a year like 2019. And so I get questions about how should we put strategies together. And so that's what we're going to focus on here for a couple of sessions.

First of all, a lot of producers in the past had simply sold across a scale and some still do. And if that's what works for them, that's perfectly fine. But as we've seen the last several years, there are some different strategies producers can employ which can actually help them navigate the risk of this market going up and down so violently at times. And so for the last three years, 15, 16, or actually 16, 17, and 18, we saw a high in the summer timeframe above $4, which wasn't exactly a home run by any stretch of the imagination.

But then we backed off into harvest all three years and a lot of folks think, "Well, we're going to see that high and back right on up into harvest again." That very well may be the case, but as a producer, our job isn't necessarily to try to outguess the market. Our job is to put together some sort of a strategy that's actually going to benefit our operation.

So the first part, in my opinion, to put a strategy together, is you absolutely have to know what your cost of production is, what it's going to cost you to break even on your farm. I don't want to just break even, but I certainly want to beat that break even as much as what I possibly can. So the first thing is I figure out what level I need to start selling at, what's going to be best for my operation.

If true break even is $3, then maybe I need to be selling at 3.25 or 3.30 bases these corn. And so the first thing is you got to know where that point is that you can start to get some return on your investment.

Second of all, we've got to put a marketing plan together that essentially puts that together. And so it works hand in hand with that cost of production break even I understand as a producer where I'm going to be able to make money and then identify where I'm going to actually start making those sales.

The next thing that I might do, by all means, is to decide what kind of percentages I'm going to be working with. And so, that changes as the calendar year goes. And so when I'm putting a strategy, when I'm putting a marketing plan together, I've got to understand that the earlier in the year, the earlier in the marketing year, I'm probably going to be a little bit less aggressive, but of course that's going to be a function of what kind of prices am I looking at?

There's just a whole host of things to consider. But earlier on in the year, I'll be a little bit less aggressive, unless the market offers me some type of ridiculous price. Later on in the year, as I get a little bit better handle on production, I might be just a little bit more aggressive. Perfect example of this is here in 2019. If producers didn't have a good fall last year and didn't get any anhydrous on, maybe they didn't apply any chemical, they're probably a little bit less likely to go ahead and sell some corn than what might be the producer that's got corn that's ankle top high right now because they were able to plant earlier, have their anhydrous on, and chemical as well.

And so every situation is different, but when you're putting a marketing plan together, you've got to know your own situation. And then you've got to be proactive about how you attack the markets. We'll come to you with another episode on how to put together a marketing plan. Some of the specifics that we can all learn from whenever we're trying to manage risk on our operations. So once again, it's been Matt Bennett, the grain marketing consultant with Channel Seed, and thank you.

Amity Shedd:
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