How to sell grain on farm in volatile markets

An increasingly volatile global marketplace can have a considerable impact on farm profitability, with huge swings in wheat prices throughout the past year.

Ex-farm feed wheat values collected by Farmers Weekly have ranged from £157/t to £184/t over the past 12 months alone, a variation of £27/t.

During a panel discussion at the Cereals event in Oxfordshire on 11 June, farmers and advisers discussed their own approaches for selling grain and managing market volatility.

Sussex arable farmer and co-founder of Hectare Trading, Andrew Huxham, said grain marketing was often overlooked and undervalued, adding that the impact of getting it right or wrong was massive for most farming businesses.

“There’s so much emphasis on the production side of farming and there has been very little emphasis on the marketing side,” he said.

Mr Huxham takes a “little and often” approach to selling grain.

“I’m a seller of something every month, but it’s not always the same commodity. It depends where the markets are and where I think I have a margin.”

Price movements

Cambridgeshire farmer James Peck, of PX Farms, emphasised that as farming businesses grow, a £1/t difference in selling price can soon become quite a substantial amount of money.

He said: “We grow 2,000ha of milling wheat, so that’s 20,000t if we’re lucky, on that basis, that’s a £20,000 shift per £1 movement.

“Can I do anything else in that given day that could potentially create a shift of £20,000, it’s probably unlikely.

“So, actually putting energy and time into grain marketing is probably time well spent.”

Mr Peck added that he had only sold about 5% of new crop so far, whereas typically by this time of year he would have sold about 30% in advance.

Meanwhile, Mr Huxham had taken a different approach and had already sold roughly 50% of wheat ahead of the new crop year.

Farmers Weekly‘s 2025 Farm Manager of the Year, Ryan McCormack, said: “You also have to look at your grain marketing strategy in hectare form.

 “When you’re achieving 9t/ha to 10t/ha, then a £10 or £20 difference [in selling price] is the equivalent to £100/ha to £200/ha.

“It makes a massive difference in the margin when you’ve got your growing costs, your working costs and your overheads per hectare.”

Aiding cashflow

Mr McCormack aims to sell grain at different times of the year to balance cashflow and storage availability, with a small amount sold at harvest, and further sales before Christmas, after Christmas, and later in the season.

Lizzie Blower, head of trading at Hectare Trading, added that there had been a very volatile market in the past year, with sellers achieving a huge variation in income depending on when they have sold wheat.

Hectare figures suggested growers who sold little and often would have averaged roughly £181/t in the past year, while sellers who sold as they saw the market spiking could have achieved a premium of up to £8/t on average.

This represents a difference of £16,000 based on 2,000 tonnes of wheat.

Meanwhile, growers who sold on a downward market are likely to have averaged closer to £173/t.

Ms Blower advised growers to look at the insights, understand the market, and take the emotion out of it, looking at those highs and then acting on that decision rather than expecting prices to continuously go up.