One thing I have observed a couple of times in my farming career is when every guru and every farming magazine is touting to know your production costs and sell at a profit and that forward contracting ahead of the crop is the best 8 out of ten times, invariably one of the remaining two times happens. Seems like when everybody is on one side of the boat, all the action is on the other.

Another possibility is for a person to feel so bad about missing the high and going past it to the down side is they sell too quick the next time.

I decided a long time ago I was no good at marketing. We just try to sell some over a long period of time and that usually gets us a pretty good average. We sold some $7 corn, not nearly as much as we would have liked, but we sold some on the way up to it and some on the way down from it. Ended up pretty good.

My daughter does most of the contracting. Right now with what is not already contracted we have divided it up in about equal increments and are selling beans and corn each week and we will be sold out around april/may. Sometimes if the market breaks badly I will have her hold up a couple weeks or if the market makes a good run we might sell a couple extra loads, but otherwise we just sell a little each week. I let her pick the day so she can beat up on herself or pat herself on the back instead of me worrying about it.

John