Plugged elevators, wide basis levels and booked up truckers have forced farmers to scramble to find ways to sell crops.
It’s leading some to look beyond the grain elevator system and connect directly to end users, says the founder of a year-old online crop marketplace.
“There are deals out there, but it’s a matter of who’s going to be proactive and seek them out,” said Brennan Turner of FarmLead.com.
His service has seen business surge since harvest, when farmers brought in crops much larger than they were expecting in midsummer.
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FarmLead is a website on which a farmer or buyer can post what they want to sell or buy, at what price and how to get the grain from buyer to seller. It posts the bids and asks for crops and users negotiate the terms of the deal themselves.
Turner said farmers are looking for ways to move their crops, especially special crops.
However, they are also looking for marginal price increases, which has become more important now that per bushel prices are much lower than in recent years.
“When wheat’s $10 a bushel, an extra couple of cents doesn’t make much of a difference,” said Turner.
The prairie grain logistics system appears to be operating well, railway officials told the Fields on Wheels conference Oct. 22.
The problem with congestion is mostly due to the massive size of crops, the late harvest and the finite capacity of the system to move everything farmers want to move.
Some marketing advisers say that certain crops and specific locations and buyers pose particular difficulties, with some unpriced or uncontracted crops being hard to move before December or January.
Many farmers contracted less than they usually would because of the lateness of seeding and the cool midsummer period.
However, this meant their proportion of priced crop fell to low levels when yields proved to be much bigger than many anticipated before they started combining.
It has now become difficult for most farmers to move anything.
Brennan said his company appears to be a beneficiary of the search for buyers and alternative markets, something he’s happy to see for a new business.
He said the amount of grain his website has moved since harvest is 40 percent of everything it transacted for all of 2012-13.
That’s partly because of a new mobile app his company is offering, he added, but it’s probably also because farmers need to be more active in marketing if they want to move anything this autumn.
