Building a data-forward culture within your agribusiness has become essential in this decade of ever-changing technology – not only to stay ahead of the game, but to also reduce risk. Some of the most important tools that agribusinesses need in order to succeed include access to high-quality streaming and historical cash grain pricing. These two things can reduce risk and drive incremental revenue through even the most simplified use case.

In conducting our Cash Grain Workflows survey to see how agribusinesses manage their cash grain workflows, we found that nearly 70% of agribusinesses still maintain their own cash database based on periodic visits of competitor websites – and often maintained in Excel – which is a huge operational risk for firms small and large. Operational risk aside, this workflow doesn’t scale, and the time spent on maintaining this data prevents employees from focusing on new ways to drive value.

The fact is – streaming and historical cash grain data is becoming table stakes – much in the way that futures data has been since the electronification of futures markets.

Looking ahead, these data-forward agribusinesses are going to be focused on better leveraging cash data to predict basis from historical seasonality, automating their bidding strategies based on constantly changing market dynamics, and finding ways to drive more business from scalable processes instead of just physical proximity.

These dynamics are reflected in the full 90% of survey respondents that indicated they would like the ability to easily compare local bids against historical seasonality in their real-time platform or Excel. However, building such a tool from scratch isn’t easy as it requires technical resources and industry knowledge to drive actionable insights.

Customers of cmdty are well positioned to take advantage of this evolving data landscape as tools like this are added every day to our commodity trading platform cmdtyView Pro, the commodity data that power our client’s workflows, as well as our Excel add-in, cmdtyView Excel.

With access to historical data on over 4,000 individual grain buying locations, up to our benchmark National Index, our workflows around data collection and maintenance provide built-in scale to agribusinesses. Our domain expertise also assures users that the information they are being presented reflects what their agribusiness needs.

Besides making cash data easier to use than ever before, cmdty is the only source for historical basis and cash price index values – allowing users to compare cash bids to historical seasonality patterns across the entire forward curve.

Users can leverage this information to identify whenever basis is out of its historical range in real-time, investigate possible reasons, develop a forecast for basis, and deploy a multi-tier grain marketing strategy to maximize profit for themselves and advisory clients.

The technology landscape is constantly changing across the agricultural industry, and agribusinesses are faced with the challenge of adapting their workflows to position themselves in an increasingly competitive industry. To learn more about how you can leverage our data and products for your agribusiness, or to learn about any of our services, drop us a line at cmdty@barchart.com or reach out here.