Anybody Dabble With The Futures Markets?

From your question, I assume that you think corn is going to go up and that because you have it to sell you want to sell at a higher price. You may be correct, it may go higher or it could go lower. I have not had a position in corn in several years but have been watching the market a little. With two or three phone calls I could take a position. I am not sure that it would be on the long side. Selling your crop and taking a long futures position in corn to off-set your sale may be the right or it could be wrong. You might be better off just selling at what you can get now and looking ahead to having another crop to sell next year. You might also consider selling next years crop now. If you have not been in futures before, rather than working with a large portion of your crop, it might be good to first take a small position. This would allow you to learn about the mechanics of the transaction and let you experience what being in the futures market is like. Since you raise corn and presuming most of the people you talk with want it to go up, you probably have developed a bullish bias. Remember there is always another crop of corn that is going to be harvested somewhere in the world in the next six months and yields are improving.
The Chicago Board of Trade is where corn trades. www.cbot.com You can get information there. Below is a link to a long term price chart on corn. Please note the price peaks in the past have been of short duration.

• Chart

If you are looking to take advantage of an increase in the futures market you might be better off buying a put that is out of the money. Doing that you would only be risking the price of the put.

Figure the cost of storage and interest on the money that you are going to store in the machine shed plus the handling cost, shrink and management risk and figure that cost against the cost of the put.

I've studied this stuff for 20 years and am not a professional, there is no simple answer or single strategy. I do think that unless you are already set up to store the grain you would be ahead to move it to market and own it on paper with some hedging strategy.