Combyne – Your Crop Marketing Hub

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What is Combyne?

Every day, farmers are faced with many important decisions for their business. Do I buy this new piece of equipment? That new tech tool? Hire another hand? Do I sell some inventory today? Am I going to get a good price for my crop? These last two questions are arguably the most important. Why? Because those are the decisions that will impact your ability to buy that new combine, hire that Grain Marketing Advisor, or spend the money on that extra bin. What can be frustrating is that markets are volatile, constantly fluctuating and ultimately out of your control; so how are you supposed to know what’s going to happen next, or whether it’s a good time to sell? Well, we have some ideas.

There are plenty of ways to hedge your risk against market volatility to prevent yourself from being bound to the market highs and lows that don’t require a fortune teller. That doesn’t mean you’re always going to get the price you want, but it does mean you can have more control over what you make on your crop sales with small changes to your record keeping and marketing strategies.

Combyne is here to help you do just that. As a crop marketing management tool, Combyne pulls together your inventory data, marketing records (contracts, load tickets, and settlements), and performance insights to show you exactly how much inventory you have sold, and what’s available to sell to your buyers. It compiles all that information to give you additional insights that help you make your next marketing decision.

You’ll be able to see things like:

✓ Your income on contracts to-date

✓ Average contracted price

✓ Final average settled price

✓ Upcoming deliveries and cashflow

✓ Dockage range and delivery progress as you haul loads

Combyne is a hub for all things crop marketing, that helps you manage your records (and nix all that paper), provides quick access to your marketed position across all your crops, and gives you helpful insights on your performance so far. The best part? The more years you use Combyne, the more visibility you will have on your performance from year to year with our Financials section of the app – currently under construction. 

You might think ‘well a spreadsheet can do all that for me’, but there are a few key things that Combyne can offer as a crop marketing management tool that Excel or any other spreadsheet can’t.

Combyne is:

✓ Designed mobile first so you can have all this right in your pocket

✓ Able to read and digitize photos and PDFs of crop marketing records in minutes

✓ Automatically reconciles inventory totals and upcoming deliveries based on contracts

✓ A tool to help you manage current and future crop years for your farm

✓ Visual focused, with graphics to help you get the information you need in seconds

✓ Has the ability to integrate with your other farm tools to automate your workflows (coming in 2023)

✓ A great way to stay on top of your crop marketing with personalized notifications and reminders

All you have to do is add your crop inventory, upload your documents from anywhere, and let Combyne do the rest of the work. With your crop inventory and contracts, load tickets, and settlements all in one place, you’ll always have an up-to-date view of your marketed position. This makes it easier to sell in smaller increments in order to hedge your market risk, and avoid overselling yourself. Tracking your average contract price alongside your inventory also helps you keep on top of your financial position so you can see whether you’re making more than your cost of production.

Having your crop marketing information in one place helps you

better understand your marketed position, and allows you to get a clear view of your progress for all your crops across each year which leads to improved decision making. This includes being able to manage your forward contracts for future years, which is another great way to capture higher market prices. There is, of course, always risk to forward contracting due to uncertainty of production, but if you have solid crop insurance, you can typically safely contract a small portion of your expected production in advance if you want to capture some higher market prices that may not be available again during the actual crop year.

The key is to make sure you’re tracking those contracts in one place and have visibility on the proportion of your projected inventory those contracts will actually take up. Combyne uses the crop year, commodity, and grade to connect your inventory and contracts and show you exactly how much you have sold of your actual or projected inventory. You can also edit your projected yield/acre throughout the crop year to make sure you have an accurate view of your sold percentage. 

And finally, one key component of crop marketing is those daily futures and local bids. Knowing what’s happening on the markets, and whether the prices are trending up or down, can help you make better decisions about what and when to sell. Combyne currently has a partnership with Farmbucks for farmers in Western Canada to see top local bids, daily, for crops in their inventory on Combyne. We will be working on expanding this feature in 2023 to include more bid sources, add in futures, and introduce some abilities to compare bids to adjust for freight and cost of carry.

Combyne is working on many new exciting things in 2023 to continue to improve its ability to help you with crop marketing decisions. From integrations with your favourite farm tools (read more about Combyne Connect), to partnerships with ag service providers, to account sharing and data export abilities that will help you more easily send data to accountants, grain marketing advisors, and much more; this is just the beginning of what Combyne can offer to help you start making better marketing decisions for your farm.

The next time a buyer asks you if you want to sell some Canola, Combyne will be at your fingertips to help you make the call.