Marketing Corn and Soybeans Using a Portfolio of Strategies

We estimate returns to six corn and soybean crop marketing strategies using cash corn and soybean prices from the northeast Indiana and southwest Indiana crop reporting districts along with Chicago Board of Trade corn and soybean futures prices from the 2004 through the 2023 crop marketing years. Strategies are compared to a baseline strategy of making all cash sales at harvest time. Risk/return frontiers are estimated for each crop and location using a Target MOTAD model. Results confirm that a variety of optimal marketing strategy portfolios can be used to substantially increase prices above those available at harvest time.