Track and Manage Crop Marketing Activities with FBN® Profit Center

01 September 2021, UK: There’s a lot on your mind when you’re a farmer. From selecting the right seed and crop protection inputs to watching the weather and monitoring pest pressures, the mental load of farming can be heavy. 

So when it comes time to sell your grain, you might find yourself without the time, energy or resources needed to develop and execute a strategy.

That’s why FBN^® Profit Center — included with your free FBN membership* and available to use after just a few minutes of setup — is such an important tool in today’s ag economy.

How can Profit Center work for your operation?

Profit Center can take some of the stress out of selling your grain and put managing important aspects of your crop marketing right at your fingertips.

From the convenience of your mobile phone, our tool lets you organize some of the day-to-day pieces of your crop marketing plan. 

Manage crop marketing activities right from your phone.
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For one, it makes it easier for you to monitor and evaluate current bids without having to call nearby elevators and/or visit multiple websites.

Our system automatically checks cash bids from more than 4,000 buyers and will show you prices within 300 miles/500 kilometers of your farm. 

You can also select your preferred points of sale, and Profit Center will always keep their bids displayed in your dashboard. 

Often you’ll find that one of the buyers closest to you will bring the greatest return, but that’s not always the case. 

Our Net Price calculator accounts for the cost of transporting your grain (based on distance) and delivery date, bringing storage costs into the equation as well.

This helps you more accurately assess current bids and factor net revenue into your marketing decisions.

4 steps to establishing a breakeven price in FBN Profit Center

Profit Center also compares the Net Price to your Target price — the price you need to break even — so you can evaluate the overall impact of a sale before you execute it.

You know all too well how it feels to have to keep up with the math in your head. Profit Center can automate the important numbers and keep up with them for you. It utilizes your real production cost to find the breakeven you need to target. Here’s how it works:

1. Select your crop

From conventional, non-GMO and organic corn and beans to specialty crops — such as edible beans, lentils, peas, and white corn — Profit Center serves farmers in a wide variety of production systems.

2. Enter your estimated production

Just multiply your total acres by your expected yield to get a rough estimate of how many bushels will be available to sell.

3. Include your committed sales

Adding any contracted bushels, as well as the price at which they were sold, will allow Profit Center to calculate and update your breakeven price as you continue to market your grain.

4. Define your costs

Here, you can provide your actual costs, or just use industry averages to see where you stand. As you start to sell grain, the system accounts for these sales and changes the necessary breakeven you’re looking for. The system will even show you you profit per acre, with updates every time you enter a new contract.

Quick access to important marketing records

And for some, the most exciting feature is that Profit Center can store all the details of your contracts and keep track of how much is left to sell, so you always know what’s left. 

No hurried trips back to the office to check contracts or wondering if your signed paper contract ever made it in the mail — all the details of your grain sales are in the palm of your hand.

To stay in the know, you can also enable Profit Center to send you text alerts based on your own Cash, Basis and Futures prices for specific months.

And you get to choose how often you want to see these alerts, ranging from several times a day to a weekly summary.

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