Reduced yields due to dry weather, as well as geopolitical events such as the Ukraine conflict combined to create volatile conditions, causing difficulties for farmers to market grain, requiring better marketing skills. Integrated risk management helps producers utilize crop insurance and grain marketing tools to attain better profitability.
Nine in-person workshops were conducted in Kansas, with 124 participants who utilized available grain marketing tools to in a grain marketing simulation. The workshop and simulation allowed participants to develop written marketing plans to be used for pre-harvest sales during the 2023 marketing year. Four other shorter sessions took place at crop insurance and ag lenders meetings as well as the annual Risk and Profit Conference, with 310 participants.
Monthly follow-up webinars helped producers continue be successful in implementing their marketing plan and help others who hadn’t participated in the workshops to develop and use a plan in 2023. These sessions evaluated the marketing plan status and the market outlook. There were ten total online sessions (4 in 2022 and 6 in 2023), with 793 total participants. There were an additional 641 views of the recordings of these webinars on YouTube, with a total of 174.8 viewing hours.