The broker recommends; the decision to sell belongs to whoever on your farm holds the final say, and you keep the two apart on a single sheet of paper. On it you write who advises the sale, the one person who decides, and the last sale with its date and the signature of the person who made it.
On the phone, the advice and the decision run together. The broker says sell now, someone says yes, the truck leaves, and a month later nobody is sure whether you sold because you chose to or because you were told to.
Many farmers hear from several people before a sale: a broker, the grain desk at the cooperative, sometimes a market advisory service, a firm that sends selling recommendations to subscribers for a fee. Olga Isengildina and colleagues at the University of Illinois surveyed crop farmers in the United States and found that only about 11 percent follow a service’s specific pricing recommendations closely; most treat the advice as background, weigh it against other sources, and do not follow it precisely.
The recommendation and the decision are already separate acts. What is usually missing is a line in writing that says which was which. Without it, a year on, you cannot tell whether following the advice helped or hurt, because nobody wrote down what was advised and who decided.
What separates a recommendation from the decision to sell?
A recommendation is someone’s view of what you should do; the decision is the act of selling, and a person on the farm makes it. Robert Wisner of Iowa State University Extension, in a guide on whether to hire a market advisory service at all, writes that the answer depends on your operation, your knowledge of marketing, and your ability to make marketing decisions under uncertain and volatile prices. The same guide describes what a service offers: help with the timing of a sale, and an outside party to give you the discipline to pull the marketing trigger. The trigger is still yours.
Does following the advice settle the question?
No, for two reasons. The advice itself can be vague. Scott Irwin and colleagues at the University of Illinois tracked advisory services from 1995 to 2004, recording the price a farmer would have received by following each. They note that where a recommendation was vague or unclear, some judgment went into whether to include it and how to implement it. On a farm, deciding what vague advice means falls to whoever takes the call. And following the advice guarantees nothing. With each year’s prices split into high, middle and low bands, following a service got a high-band price only a modest 17 to 25 percent of the time in corn, most often a middle one.
Advice does change what farmers do. A 2026 review of the research on price risk, by Spada and colleagues in the Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, found that use of forward contracts, futures and options stays low, while advisory and extension services raise the odds a farmer adopts them. Even then, the farmer is the one who adopts them. What the advice cannot supply is the choice and the name of the person who made it, and those go on the sheet.
Who advises, who decides, and when does an adviser decide for you?
Put the advisers on one side of the sheet and the person who decides on the other. The advisers are the people whose word you weigh: the broker, the cooperative’s grain desk, the marketing consultant. The decider is the one person with the final say to sell, whether that is the owner, a partner or a hired farm manager. Iowa State notes that a service builds its recommendations for an average or typical producer, and the level right for your farm may differ with your costs, your capacity to carry risk and your production risk. Someone has to turn general advice into this farm’s decision, and that person’s name goes on the sheet.
In one arrangement the two roles merge. Some firms offer managed marketing, where, as the same guide describes it, the firm takes over the entire marketing job for the farmer, for an annual fee. That is a legitimate choice, but it hands the decision itself to someone outside the farm, under contract and for a fee, so it is no longer advice. On the sheet, mark which advisers give advice you weigh and which, if any, hold a decision you have handed over.
What goes on the sheet, and who signs it?
The sheet has three parts. First, who advises the sale, each with a name and a phone number. Second, the one person on the farm with the final say to sell: a name, not a committee. Third, the last sale that actually happened, with the date it was decided and the signature of the person who decided it. You fill it in by hand, from what you already know and the settlement you already hold.
The date and the name matter because a farm makes few pricing decisions. The Isengildina survey found most farms make only a handful of pricing decisions in a crop year, commonly between two and five, few enough that each one deserves its own line.
A 2025 article on grain marketing in Choices, the magazine of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, notes that the timing and the channel of a sale weigh directly on what the farm earns and on the risk it carries. Without the date and the name, next year you cannot set a decision beside the settlement it produced and ask whether the advice was worth following. Checking each decision against how it turned out is a habit that serves the rest of farm management as well.
What does the sheet settle, and what does it leave out?
With the sheet you can show who decided each sale and when, but not whether the price was good. Nor will it help you pick a service, test whether advice beats the market, build a marketing plan or work out the price you net after a hedge. Those questions have their own articles in the marketing section of the library.
The price of a sale also depends on how the grain graded. If you keep a written record of each load’s grade, file this sheet beside it, and you can see what was sold, how it graded and who chose to sell it. If you keep no such record, there is another article in this library on the buyer’s grade standard: how to write down the buyer’s grading rules and check each settlement against them, factor by factor.
Where to start
Half an hour, with the last settlement and a blank sheet on the table.
A recommendation arrives with urgency, because the market moves while you make up your mind. Before you answer the broker’s next call, read the last line on the sheet, who advised that sale and who decided it, with the settlement from that sale beside it. That is what you weigh the new advice against.