How to build a grain marketing plan
3-MINUTE READ
A good grain marketing plan helps you sell at the right time, for the right price, to meet your business needs. It brings structure to your sales decisions, helping you manage risk and secure long-term profitability.
Without a plan, it’s easy to fall into reactive decision-making – selling when cash is tight or when stores are full, rather than when you can get the best price.
A grain marketing plan helps you take control in fast-moving markets, balancing price opportunity against timing and cash-flow needs. It also helps you spread risk across the season instead of relying on one selling window.
In essence, a good grain marketing plan manages the twin challenges of time and price, within the limits of your storage and cash flow.
Lay the groundwork
Before you start shaping your plan, gather the key information that underpins your decisions:
Select your crops for the coming harvest year
Estimate your cost of production (including seed, fertiliser, fuel, machinery, labour and other overheads)
Calculate your breakeven price per crop based on predicted yields
Assess your cash-flow requirements – when you’ll need to generate income for bills, loan repayments or rent
Consider your storage capacity – how much grain can you hold, and for how long? – and whether you can access third-party storage
This information forms the backbone of your grain marketing plan, helping you make realistic, risk-managed selling decisions.
Timing
Timing is one of the most powerful levers in grain marketing. A simple way to approach it is to divide your marketing year into three key phases:
Pre-harvest
Decisions before harvest are mostly price-driven. This is when you can sell grain forward, locking in prices before you’ve harvested a tonne. Forward contracts allow you to manage risk, capture favourable prices and ease pressure at harvest.
As soon as you’ve committed to your cropping plan, you can start selling portions of your expected yield, up to a level you’re comfortable with based on your historic yields.
Harvest
This is often a logistical challenge – managing cutting, carting and storage. Without a plan, many farmers end up selling “off the combine” simply to clear space, often when prices are weakest.
A clear marketing plan helps you decide in advance what to sell before or at harvest and what to store for later opportunities. Selling at harvest with delayed delivery can help maximise your return, as there can be a significant carry even for selling in August for September movement.
Post-harvest
Once the grain is in store, decisions become more time-driven. You can monitor market trends and sell when conditions are right – whether that’s later in the year, during seasonal price rises or when a buyer’s contract window opens.
A strategy of selling little and often can help you make the most of short-term rallies or reach levels exceeding your target price.
As the post-harvest period of your old crop overlaps the pre-harvest period of your new crop, it’s best to keep your planning for different harvest years separate. Distinct plans help maintain clarity and avoid confusion.
Storage
Storage capacity plays a huge part in how flexible your plan can be.
With on-farm storage:
You can hold grain and sell into potentially stronger markets later in the season. You have the flexibility to sell forward for later movement, taking advantage of the “carry” factored into the market price. Forward-selling can also help you secure sales of premium crops before buyers’ quotas are reached.
Without storage:
You’ll need to sell for immediate delivery or use third-party storage, incurring extra costs. In this case, early forward-selling in the pre-harvest period is especially valuable – helping you lock in prices and avoid having to take whatever’s offered at the last minute.
Create your selling schedule
Once you’ve gathered your figures and assessed constraints, it’s time to create your selling schedule.
For each crop, map out your planned sales across the full harvest year, showing the tonnage you need to move by which dates to meet your cash-flow and storage constraints, along with your long-term profit target.
Here’s what that might look like in practice:
Example grain marketing plan: 200 ha Group 1 wheat
Assumptions:
Total expected wheat yield: 8 t/ha = 1,600 tonnes
Cost of production: £1,531 per hectare
Breakeven price: £1,531 / 8 t/ha = £191/t
Target profit margin: 5%
Target price: £191/t + 5% = £201/t
Storage capacity: 1,000t (on farm)
Cash requirements:
£130,000 by 30 September 2026
£150,000 by 31 December 2026
Example selling schedule overview for 1,600 tonnes of Group 1 wheat, harvest year 2026
Your detailed selling schedule will be broken down by month within these three periods, showing exactly how each period breaks down into intended monthly sales. The fine-tuning of your schedule will be determined by your appetite for risk and your desire to lock in prices by forward-selling.
The aim of the plan is simply to show how you can move your crop throughout the year to hit your cash-flow deadlines while maximising your long-term profitability.
Review and adjust through the year
No plan stays fixed. As the year unfolds, you’ll update your figures based on:
Actual yields and crop quality achieved
Final amounts for your variable costs
Changes in storage availability or cash-flow needs
As scheduled sales turn into actual sales, you can update the plan to see whether you are hitting your projected revenue based on your average selling price.
You stay in control of your plan, rather than your plan controlling you. It is a living document, revisited regularly and used to guide rather than dictate decisions.
A well-structured plan helps you decide how to use storage strategically – not just as somewhere to put grain, but as a financial tool to improve returns – while giving you the flexibility to respond to market opportunities.
Whether you create your own spreadsheet or use our Grain Marketing Planner to generate your selling schedule, a clear grain marketing plan keeps you focused on maximising your average selling price throughout each harvest year.
Want to know how much buyers in your region are currently paying? View market insights on Hectare Trading or post your own free crop listing.
This article is for general information only and is not an instruction to trade. While we make every effort to ensure the accuracy of the content at the time of publication, Hectare Trading makes no guarantee regarding the data provided.