GRAIN marketing advisory firm Market Check has launched a new education platform aimed at demystifying grain markets for anyone involved in the ag industry, from growers through to bankers, agronomists, feedlotters and graduates just starting out in agribusiness.

The Market Check Academy (MCA) is an online, video-based course covering seven modules on the fundamentals of grain marketing, presented entirely by Market Check’s own Advisory Team. The content covers the basics of grain markets, through to more complex marketing strategies like hedging with futures and options.

Founded in 1994, Market Check has grown into one of the country’s leading grain marketing advisory firms, with offices in Sydney, Wagga Wagga, Murrurundi, Adelaide and Melbourne. Education has been part of the business for most of that time. The firm has run regional seminars for growers for more than 30 years, holding upwards of 40 a year across the country. The Academy, Market Check CEO Nick Crundall said, is the next chapter in that same story.

“We’ve been doing seminars in country halls and pubs for 30-odd years, and we’ll keep that effort up. There’s no substitute for being in a room with growers,” he said. “But you can only get to so many people that way, and not everyone can make a seminar on a particular day. The Academy means someone can get the same grounding at 10am on a Sunday if that’s when they’ve got some spare time. It’s about giving people more ways to improve their grain marketing knowledge.”

Crundall said the idea for a structured online course had been building for years, out of the same conversations happening on the seminar circuit and the Advisory Team talking to clients.

“We talk to growers every day about markets, futures, risk management, all of it. The ones who have a handle on those concepts, even a basic handle, tend to make better decisions and end up performing better when turning their grain to cash. What we kept running into was that there was nowhere for someone to actually go and learn this stuff properly outside of a seminar. It was bits and pieces from a newsletter here, a podcast there. We wanted to build something people could come back to.”

The fundamentals the Academy teaches do not change much from year to year, but the case for growers being across them has increased in recent times. Grain prices have been unusually volatile over the past few seasons, buffeted by weather events offshore, freight and currency swings, and the odd geopolitical curveball that can move a market dramatically overnight. At the same time, input costs have kept climbing, squeezing the margin between what it costs to grow a tonne of grain and what a grower actually banks for it.

“Yield is still the big one, that’s what drives a lot of the margin outcome. But marketing is a really important lever a grower and can pull to improve overall profitability,” Crundall said. “We often find that grain marketing gets overlooked, especially when younger generations are stepping into business decisions.”

That is the gap the MCA is aimed at closing: giving people the tools to set themselves up for success in grain marketing, as well as give other agribusiness professionals the opportunity to upskill in grain markets.

The seven modules are broken down into short videos, each one running between four and ten minutes, designed to be worked through at the user’s own pace. Each module wraps up with a short quiz, giving participants a way to check what has actually sunk in before they move on to the next topic.

Not just for growers

While growers are the obvious audience, Market Check is pitching the Academy much more broadly. Anyone whose work touches grain markets stands to get something out of it.

“It’s not just for growers. We’ve had agronomists complete the course, seed reps, ag students, bankers who deal with farming clients and want to understand the marketing side of the business better, ” he said. “If your job involves talking to growers about their business, or you’re trying to break into the industry, understanding how grain actually gets marketed is a pretty fundamental piece of the puzzle. We built it so it works for all of those people, not just someone on the producing side of the industry.”

A banker on an agribusiness lending desk might get more out of conversations with farming clients about cash flow and risk. A feedlotter might want a clearer read on what is driving the grain price that makes up their biggest input cost. For a graduate or student trying to break into the industry, it is a shortcut to concepts that might otherwise take years to pick up on the job.

Filling a gap in the market

Grain growers are not short of market commentary. Price updates, seasonal outlooks and analyst notes land in inboxes daily. What has been missing, according to Market Check, is something that teaches the mechanics behind all of that commentary.

Registrations are open now at marketcheck.com.au/academy. Market Check said anyone who signs up can expect to hear from the Team within 24 hours to get set up.

For growers, advisors, bankers or anyone else with a stake in how grain gets priced and sold, it might be worth a look. Getting a proper handle on how the market works is no longer a nice-to-have, and the Academy is aimed at being the easiest place to start.