New for Our Members: Forward Price Reports
With corn and soybean crops planted and summer underway, we’re rolling out new price reports for our Members. Our market data comes from first handlers across the U.S. We’re excited to announce that we are able to post prices for a selection of forward delivery months. Below is a snapshot of national organic feed corn prices (delivered) through August 2014.
The forward price curve below captures rising feed corn prices that began earlier this year and continue through the summer. Mercaris offers a similar report for organic soybeans. Since food-grade beans tend to be contracted further out, the soybean price curve extends out to February 2015.
We hope these reports serve as useful market intelligence. To help you interpret them, a bit of detail on how they are generated. First, they are not forecasts; they are based on market participants who are part of the Mercaris data survey that signed forward contracts for delivery of grain. The reports show the value of those contracts per bushel, on average. Of course, we have to wait and see what the organic corn cash market settles at in August! For now, we can observe a trend of rising corn prices over the next three months based on forward contracts signed in the last 30 days.
Stay tuned for next month’s newsletter: our survey has been running for a full year and we’ll have a fascinating analysis on just how good forward prices were at predicting the cash market ahead of time.
|