With global grain markets reacting to geopolitics, weather and input pressure, crop marketing has become less about chasing the perfect price and more about managing exposure. CPM explores.
“You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you don’t understand costs, it’s irrelevant.” FREDDIE HUMFREY
By Charlotte Cunningham
There was a time when crop marketing could be treated as a job for later. Get the crop in the ground, grow it well, harvest it safely, and then think about what to do with the tonnage once it was in store. But as arable businesses have been reminded repeatedly during recent seasons, that approach is becoming harder to justify.
Markets are now moving against a backdrop of war, tariffs, volatile energy prices, uncertain fertiliser availability, currency shifts and increasingly unpredictable weather. At the same time, the cost of growing a crop has risen sharply, meaning the consequences of getting marketing decisions wrong can be more severe.
For Helen Plant, analyst at AHDB, ‘unpredictability’ remains the watchword. While autumn-planted UK crops came through winter looking reasonably well, she says weather through spring and into early summer will continue to shape both yield prospects and marketing decisions.
“We’ve had some dry weather this spring which will have helped planting progress in most areas, but rainfall levels now have to be watched in terms of how spring crops get going,” says Helen. “Autumn-planted crops came through the winter looking well, but how things grow on remains important, and disease pressure is a concern in some areas.”
From a marketing perspective, that means growers are having to make decisions before knowing exactly what they have to sell. Helen points out that last season is likely to be on people’s minds, because at this point many crops still had potential before weather later changed the picture. “We’re monitoring prices at the moment, but when thinking ahead to marketing the 2026 crop, growers have to make a judgement on their own appetite to risk.”
Of course, that risk is being shaped well beyond the farmgate. Globally, many Northern Hemisphere crops have had a reasonable start, although dry weather in parts of the US wheat belt has been supporting prices. But the bigger question is how spring cropping decisions respond to higher fertiliser and fuel costs.
Helen says oilseed markets are a particular area to watch. Earlier expectations were for OSR areas to make small gains, but higher nitrogen and energy costs could encourage growers in some regions to move away from more input-hungry crops. In Canada, that may mean more spring rapeseed, while in Europe it could mean sunflowers, and in the US more soyabeans. “That all contributes to the oilseeds picture,” she says. “There’s potential for higher global oilseed supplies for the new crop, weather willing, and that could pose a tempering risk to prices.”
For UK growers, the challenge is that domestic conditions don’t operate in isolation. Freddie Humfrey, head of grain trading at ADM, describes the current outlook as ‘challenging’ because rising input costs are colliding with a globally well-supplied grain market.
“We’ve had significant appreciation in input prices, whether fertiliser or crude-related products, particularly in the past couple of months,” he says. “But that sits against a wider theme of increased inputs, labour and machinery costs during the past few years, and that hasn’t abated.”
At the same time, he says global wheat and maize markets have been well supplied, which has weighed on output values. For UK growers, that’s been particularly difficult because imported alternatives have often been available at similar values, limiting the ability of UK grain to rise independently.
“From a UK farmer perspective, the window we sit in is that like-for-like replacements have been available at similar prices to the UK. So the opportunity for the UK to appreciate in isolation has been very limited, particularly on the cereals side,” explains Freddie.
Although new crop values have improved from recent lows, he says the numbers still don’t look easy. November wheat futures had recovered from the low £170s/t into the mid-£180s/t, but higher grain prices haven’t fully offset higher inputs. “Looking at the numbers, input costs and appreciation in grain prices haven’t quite netted out yet, so gross margin isn’t looking particularly happy at this second,” he warns.
That margin pressure is changing the starting point for marketing conversations. Rather than asking what price might be possible, Freddie says growers have to understand what price they require.
“The first thing we continue to push hard is understanding costings. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you don’t understand costs, it’s irrelevant.”
That means knowing the cost of production not as a static figure, but under different yield and input scenarios. “For example, what does 160kgN/ha of nitrogen compared with 180kgN/ha or 200kgN/ha mean for yield, output and final margin? What happens if yield is 0.5t/ha lower than budgeted? What happens if drying costs increase?
“Having a significant understanding of what that costing looks like on variable yield scenarios and final fertiliser applications is key,” he adds. “Without that, strategic conversations become a little anecdotal.”
That point is particularly relevant as growers look at both 2026 harvest and the following drilling campaign. If nitrogen products remain around £600/t, he says either yield and price will have to perform strongly, or input costs will have to ease, for margins to become more comfortable,
But because UK growers have limited influence over global price direction, the practical focus has to be on managing exposure. This is where marketing strategy becomes more than simply choosing when to sell.
For Glenn Mason, grain market manager at Openfield, the important point is that volatility, while uncomfortable, does create opportunity. He says the market has been dominated by geopolitical events with headlines capable of moving prices within the day.
“Daily we get tweets or headlines which can move the market £3-4/t,” he continues. “The market has become a little more desensitised recently, but the fact remains that it’s having an effect.”
Old crop markets had been under pressure because of record global wheat and maize production, he says, with supply plentiful and buyers able to sit back. But more recently, UK values had risen from their lows, helped by uncertainty in the Middle East, the ongoing war in Ukraine, Black Sea risk and US tariff policy.
This article was taken from the latest issue of CPM. Read the article in full here.
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