Farmer's Business Network launches commodity crop marketing platform

Date:06-04-2018

Farmer's Business Network, Inc., the independent farmer-to-farmer network, together with its affiliate companies, recently announced the launch of its Commodity Crop Marketing platform to help farmers make better decisions when marketing their grain.

For many farmers, crop marketing is notoriously stressful and time-consuming. Information is available, but it's often hard to know what's important versus what's noise. It's even harder to turn that information into accurate decision making. Farmer's Business Network, Inc. is looking to help reduce farmers' marketing pain points and make better decisions.

"After talking to hundreds of members, farmers kept telling us they wanted more marketing support but it needed to be affordable." said Devin Lammers, Head of FBN Commodity Crop Marketing. "FBN Commodity Crop Marketing provides an extensive and affordable suite of crop marketing services that can help farmers make better decisions through data driven, personalized, and actionable advice, and take action on those decisions through independent cash contracts and brokerage."

FBN Commodity Crop Marketing offers the following products and services to help make the grain marketing process simpler, more efficient, and transparent:

- FBN Cash Grain Management: A premium crop marketing advisory service that provides subscribers with a personal grain marketing manager to advise on marketing strategies, provide selling recommendations, and a personalized marketing plan.

- FBN Market Intelligence: A subscription content service providing commodity markets news, analysis, and insights through email newsletters, custom reports, webinars and in-person meetings (included in Cash Grain Management)

- FBN Brokerage: A low cost commodity brokerage account where members can trade on the futures market at significantly lower cost than typical Ag brokerages.

- FBN Cash Contracts: Forward contracts that allow FBN members to take forward positions with more options and flexibility than those that come with traditional contracts.

Farmers are looking for new crop marketing solutions.

"Farmers Business Network has clearly been a disruptor in crop inputs. The crop marketing world needs the same thing and now it has it," said Brandon Hunnicutt, Nebraska farmer and FBN member. "FBN has really shown itself in the last few years that they are capable of gathering, producing and generating good data, quickly. Good data leads to good decision making especially when you're marketing your crop. And with the speed that FBN can deliver info, we'll be able to respond and make better decisions quicker than we've ever been able to."

The FBN network is dedicated to building an independent farm economy that is efficient and boosts farmers' profitability.

"We are building advisory services that are accurate, easy and affordable," said Lammers. "We are matching that with tools that keep farmer decision making independent, allowing farmers to develop better strategies and maximize basis. In the end, we want to enable farmers to become their own elevators."

Building Out a Full Crop Marketing Platform

Commodity Crop Marketing builds on FBN Crop Marketing, which launched initially in 2017, with FBN Profit Center.

- FBN Profit Center automatically analyzes the estimated profitability of thousands of bids based on each farmer's individualized costs of production, transportation, and storage - and identifies the best options. Farmers also get automatic alerts for "in-the-money" bids, delivered right to their phones.

Creating a Full Profit System to Put Farmers First

The idea for the FBN network originated from farmers who wanted to create an independent, farmer-driven information and commerce network. The FBN network makes fair market input prices, real-world seed performance or optimal grain delivery points transparent in a no frills way - driven by member-contributed statistics from its millions of acres of member farms.

With the price transparency and online purchasing through FBN Direct, farms have commonly saved tens of thousands on inputs in a single year. Combined with the FBN analytics platform - the industry's most advanced farm analytics system - and FBN Crop Marketing, farmers now have a full profit system with the FBN network.

The FBN network is available throughout the United States and prairie provinces in Canada. For more information, visit farmersbusinessnetwork.com