Forward Contract Calculator

A forward contract locks in a cash price today for grain you'll deliver later, and that price is built from two pieces: the futures market price for the relevant contract month, plus your local basis — the difference between your elevator's cash price and the futures price, driven by transportation, local supply/demand, and storage economics. This calculator adds the futures price and your expected basis directly to get the forward price; note that basis is commonly negative (grain typically priced under futures), so a basis of -0.35 lowers the forward price rather than raising it. Total revenue is the forward price times the bushels you're contracting. Storage saved estimates what you'd have spent on on-farm storage over the months until delivery, calculated the same way as a standalone storage-cost estimate — it's shown here because contracting forward is often an alternative to storing the grain yourself, so this cost avoidance is a real economic benefit of the contract even though it's not part of the cash price itself.

Effective price adds those storage savings back on top of the forward price, giving a combined figure for comparing "forward contract now" against "store and price later" on equal footing. Percent of futures captured shows the forward price as a share of the raw futures price, a quick way to see how much basis is costing (or, rarely, adding) relative to the board price. Remember that basis is a forecast here, not locked in the way futures-based forward prices usually are — actual basis at delivery can move against you.