Marketing Plan Calculator

Most successful grain marketers don't try to time one perfect sale — they spread bushels across several pricing methods and months to average into a good price while managing risk. This calculator lets you split your total expected production across four buckets — harvest cash sales, pre-harvest forward contracts, on-farm storage sold later, and futures/options hedges — each with its own expected price. It multiplies each bucket's bushels by its price to get a revenue figure, sums all four, and divides by total bushels to produce your weighted average price: the blended price you'd actually realize if every bucket performs as expected.

Total revenue is the dollar sum across all methods. Two numbers matter for keeping the plan honest: allocation total percentage should sum to 100 — a complete plan assigns every bushel somewhere — and unallocated bushels shows what's left over (or, if your percentages add past 100%, this figure can go negative, a sign to fix your allocations before relying on the output). Because each method's price is an input you supply rather than a live market feed, the weighted average is only a planning estimate: forward and hedge prices reflect what you've actually locked in, while storage and un-priced harvest bushels use whatever price assumption you enter, so revisit the plan as those prices firm up during the marketing year.