Ways to Manage Your Grain Inventory

Would you bet thousands of bushels of grain on your memory? Are you 100% certain that the squiggly line on your whiteboard is a one, or is it a nine or seven? Are you confident that you know where the grain in your bins came from? If you need to fulfill a pending contract for #2 corn, are you sure you know how much you have on hand?

Naturally, you may likely have a nagging doubt that your current system has definite flaws that could let you down. However, manual scribbling on a whiteboard or inputting notes on a spreadsheet is most likely the way you’ve always recorded information in the past. However, there is a lot riding on the manually inputted information. Are you certain that the way you are tracking the quality of your grain acceptable in today’s volatile market?

Accurate Calculations Help You Manage Your Grain Inventory

Of course, you need to know how much grain you have and what quality it is with weighted average grade factors. If you don’t know what you have, you can’t market it, and you shouldn’t have to estimate what is in your bins. Accurate calculations are a must to help you see what fits the requirements for grain contracts.

Grain handlers who accurately capture the attributes of each load and deliver consistent quality earn the reputation of reliability. This helps ensure ongoing supplier-of-choice business relationships with processors.

Why Segregation of Grain is Important for Managing Your Grain Inventory

It’s more important than ever to know the quality attributes of your grain. End-users are requesting more specific characteristics, whether the grain is ultimately destined for food, feed, or fuel. Plus, grain quality has a direct effect on the bottom line. Inventory management can no longer be “hit or miss”, and your staff must have a solid grasp of quality control.

Having consistent grain quality impacts a processor’s ability to provide consistency in their finished products to help improve customer satisfaction and protect brand identity. Blending, of course, is key for accurately delivering on contract specs. Estimating is not the best way to determine averages, but it’s all some grain businesses can do. Knowing what is in each bin is crucial, and segregating allows businesses to keep commodities with valuable traits separate. This empowers your agribusiness to command a higher premium and to hold value above the base price when using weighted averages to make the margin.

Eliminate Estimations to Improve Your Grain Inventory

Knowing the attributes of your grain allows you to make solid business decisions fast to take advantage of market conditions. Having the right kind of information about your grain inventory helps you deliver what the market wants when it wants it. As you know, can mean additional premiums.

Putting real-time information into your merchandiser’s hands is critical for getting the most out of market opportunities. Not having a solid way to keep track of what is in each bin, means averages would have to be estimated. Typically when estimating averages, it increases the chance of not getting the best price because the estimate was too low.

Implement Identity Preservation and Traceability Tool

The FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act, Section 204 compliance date is set for January 20, 2026. With this, any businesses that manufacture, process, pack, transport, distribute, receive, store, or import food must establish and maintain records identifying the source of food and who is receiving it. 

This is why grain businesses must have documentation of where grain came from, where it is at their facilities, and where it is now, to be compliant with the regulations. Managing and preserving grain identity does add complexity to operations. However, you can eliminate the stress of complying with federal regulations by implementing a grain identity preservation tool.

Take the Next Step to Manage Your Grain Inventory