Episode 37: The Power of AgYield

From digital trading systems to artificial intelligence, AgYield has built a portfolio of powerful technology tools that simplify the grain marketing process for farmers. Their vision, when founding the company over a decade ago, was ahead of the industry. Now, they are on the cusp of agriculture’s digital evolution, offering a series of fully customizable farm revenue management programs, like managed pricing. 

“If you are going to enroll bushels in a managed pricing program,” says AgYield founding member Justin Kelly, “you should learn a lot about how those strategies are set.” So dive into AgYield’s approach, when they were founded, why they believe in always having a Plan B, what it means to support educating the next generation of farmers, and how Justin and his team can bring confidence to your marketing plan.

TRANSCRIPT

Rodney: Today, I've got Justin Kelly he's president and founding member of AgYield. AgYield is one of our GMA partners here at Indigo. We work pretty closely with AgYield here. Happy to have you on the show, Justin. Just to get a little background, what got you started in AgYield?

Justin: I grew up on a family farm, Northwest Illinois. So about 3000 acres, corn, soybeans. My father and brother, youngest brother, still run that farm. After high school, I went to Purdue, stayed in agriculture there, graduated agribusiness management. Another family business was at the Chicago Board of Trade. I went and worked there full-time as a... Worked my way up as a runner and a phone clerk. Eventually, I was a pit broker there in the corn pit filling customer orders, trading for my own account. When the markets started going electronic, the days were numbered of pit trading and those sorts of things. I moved into creating AgYield. We had a large clearing firm that was a family owned business called Iowa Grain Company. We cleared-

Rodney: That's a legendary grain company in the industry. I think it was a little before my time. When was that?

Justin Kelly: Well, we sold it in 2008, started in 1960 grandfather. In 2008, at that time, we were the largest family owned clearing firm there. The days of going from $3 corn to $8 corn, during that timeframe, you had to be a large bank or a big institution to be able to clear that kind of business in those kinds of markets.

Rodney: Yeah, that's right.

Justin Kelly: The opportunity was right. ADM approached us and we ended up selling most of those assets to ADMIS in 2008. It's about the same time I was transitioning. The only asset that we kept was our own in-house brokerage firm called EHedger. And so, that's where I started. I came off of the floor, started running EHedger, which was our direct to farmer risk management service. Your traditional brokerage, recommend, puts and calls, and different strategies to farmers.

Justin Kelly: As I did that, I basically did the winner circuit, like a lot of other brokers out there, and tried to sell how great we were, and came to the conclusion that we needed ag. As far as risk management for farmers really hasn't changed in a hundred years. It's an opinion of where you think the market's going. Coming from the floor of the clearing business, the whole reason the Board of Trade, the CME, was created was to help mitigate risk. Unfortunately, a hundred years later, very few people were utilizing it.

Rodney: That's right.

Justin Kelly: A lot of it is education or misinformation on... You always hear a story, "Oh, I got killed at the Board of Trade."

Rodney: There's always a guy lost the farm at the board of trade, always. Yeah.

Justin Kelly: That's where I started creating, in late 2007, early 2008, what today is AgYield. It's a sister company. It's all about a platform where you can bring in all the farmers' data, field level data, their yields, their crop insurance, all the transactions, and then be able to visually show how the financial strength of that farm. We can now, our brokers or consultants could then show growers, here's your actual farm. Here's your numbers. Here's your data. If we recommend anything from crop insurance policy to a head strategy, whether it's just a cash grain sale or an accumulator, or puts or calls, we can plug those into our system. It'll show that grower what the expected outcome of that strategy is. So now, the grower can visually see, how is this going to affect me on my farm?

Justin Kelly: It really helped us grow our business, because we had math, we had reasons to back up why we we're recommending a strategy versus, "Hey, we want to buy these puts." It's really not customized to the grower. And then, inevitably, if they lose money in a hedging account, they're upset. It cost them something. Versus to say, "Hey, maybe you lost $25,000 or $30,000 in a hedge account, but you picked up a $100,000 on your physical grain that you're holding in your bin." It allowed us to tie all that together and just make better decisions. That's what's really driven our company in the last 10 years or so.

Rodney: Yeah. That's great. Sounds like, if I'm a farmer, and I ask you, "Hey, Justin, you think the market's going to go up or down tomorrow?", that's not going to be a yes or no, or that's not going to be a simple answer. Right?

Justin Kelly: Yeah, right. There's still some of that. It's always an emotional game that you play every year. I think what we try to do is say, "Look, if you..." The farmer thinks, "Hey, it's South America weather's looking bad, this is a good example this year. And I think corn's really going to $5, or gains are going to $15." Whatever the case may be, we can show them, okay, well, here's what happens if that does happen. Here's what happens if you're wrong. And so, a lot of what we do is trying to prevent really bad mistakes. We're not going to hit the home runs. We're not going to do all those things. But what we can do is, like hiring a good attorney or a good accountant, we can take the information, the feedback that the grower's given us, what they're looking for, and then try to find a solution that, hey, if you're right, you're going to make a lot of money, but if you're wrong, you're not going to be selling land off. And that's really what our goal is, is to prevent the really bad mistakes and keep you in the game.

Rodney: Yeah, that's right. You mentioned that your grandfather started the business there. I imagine some of those learnings came from his knowledge. Sounds like he's been around doing this for a while. What did you pick up from him that plays a role in your business today?

Justin Kelly: I'm third generation. He died at a young age. He died when I was in high school. And so, he'd certainly taught my uncles and the second generation a lot. They're the ones that really grew Iowa Grain Company. He was a very successful trader. And so, he started the farms and he was a successful speculator. We're the second generation. My uncles, his kids, really grew Iowa Grain into more of a clearing firm, risk management type company. Unfortunately, everybody can't be a great trader. That was his signature. It developed from that into understanding the markets, into how to mitigate risks. At Iowa Grain, we were dealing more commercially, so the big feed lots in the country, ethanol plants, dairy operations, more on the commercial side, elevators, as I know you worked at, those were our primary clients. And then, when I took over Ehedger, that was really when we transitioned into direct to the grower.

Rodney: A lot of complexity around grain marketing, man. There is nuance. I'm 16 years into this business right now. I think I know about 3%, if I had to guess. I'm sure you're higher than that. What I see is growers just, they love the agronomy side. That is complex to the same degree, I think. I don't know anything about chemical programs and all that stuff. I'm curious, what do you think is so intimidating to the grower about the grain marketing? What are the easy things they could learn today that they just don't do for whatever reason?

Justin Kelly: One of the terms I've never liked is marketing plan. It's thrown around a lot, have a marketing plan. Well, unfortunately, a lot of those marketing plans are, if it goes up to $4.50, I'm going to sell it. Right?

Rodney: Yep. No, that's exactly right. Yeah.

Justin Kelly: It gets here, it's going to go some much higher price. I'm going to sell it and make a bunch of money.

Rodney: Yeah.

Justin Kelly: When it gets here, it's going to go so much higher price. I'm going to sell it and make a bunch of money. That's my plan. And I always liked to, one of our philosophies is what's your Plan B? It's fine to have a Plan A, and you should have a Plan A, but the simplest change I would make for a lot of growers is what happens if that doesn't happen?

Justin Kelly: And inevitably it's, well I just store it and wait until it does. And that's where danger happens, right? It's the unintended consequence of owning a physical asset. The problem with it is there is no margin call, right? So as a trader, if I were to go buy a million bushels of corn and it went down twenty cents, I lost $200,000. A grower has a million bushels in the bin and it breaks 20 cents they don't, it's not a realized loss, right, but it is a loss.

Justin Kelly: And what we try to do also, in our software, is kind of show that, right? We try to make it real. And I think that's where a lot of trouble has come the last five, six, seven years, is a grower goes and gets a loan from the bank. They don't do a good job marketing. It gets co-mingled with the next loan for the next crop year. And it's just, it's never, it's never realized, it's never reconciled. It goes from a short-term debt to a note. Now you've got, all of a sudden, it's like how did I lose all this money?

Justin Kelly: And I think people would have been a lot better off if you had to settle up every contract. If the farmer would go, we laugh about it. If, on day one when they borrow the money they went and sold all of it to the elevator, and they re-owned whatever they wanted to in futures or call options, and then they could see those losses they'd be a lot better marketer. They wouldn't hold on to a losing position as long as they do.

Rodney: My mind is blown right now. I have always said the problem with a brokerage account, which I'm sure you guys offer direct brokers to your customers. We dealt with it this year. I'll give you an example.

Rodney: We watched 859 dollar beans all summer long. This, by the way, I think was the worst summer I've had in my whole career as far as just mentality, right? Like, to your point, it felt like the end of the road. This thing was not going to, we weren't going to come out the other side. Beans rally up to 980. Man, no-brainer, I watched a $1.50 come back into my family farm's pocket, right? So we went out, we went ahead and put on a min-max, 980/1040, feeling good. And literally three days later, I'm calling my dad up, telling him he's got a margin this account that he didn't have.

Rodney: So the pain associated with the margin account is so hard. And when the grower makes a sale, even if it makes sense, if he's wrong he feels this pain, which makes them not make future sales, right? I felt it in my family farm. I love your idea. How do we build that in? Margin a farmer for the long side? That's great.

Justin Kelly: Right. Right.

Rodney: So how do you actually bring that to a customer, make them feel that pain without having to write a check? Or do you do that?

Justin Kelly: We do. You bring up a great point. I mean, what we did about, [inaudible 00:12:00] their third year, we do some with Indigo, for sure. We do our managed bushel programs. So one of the big pains out there is, we go out, we offer our consulting services, but it's really 10, maybe 15% of the growers that A, are interested in spending the time, the resources, or B, have the capital to do it. A lot of growers, yeah, this sounds great, but realistically you need $1500 an acre available to be able to hedge your bushels and stay with margin calls, those kinds of things. And that's, unfortunately in this environment, is not feasible for a lot of growers.

Justin Kelly: So we basically found a way where we can take that margin pressure off of them and embed it into a cash grain contract, and they can customize it based on the kind of strategies they like. But it converts into a physical sale at the end of the term, so they can deliver where they want. They get paid like a normal cash grain contract. We just embedded the marketing in there for them. And that's helped a lot, that's helped cater to the other 80% that don't want a brokerage account.

Justin Kelly: Or even clients that we've had for years that are fine with margin calls, they understand it, to your point, it's still stressful. It's great when the market's going down in your hedge. When the market goes up you feel like you're just losing money every day, even if the net results positive.

Rodney: That's right.

Justin Kelly: Mentally, a challenge, right? So by putting those into a physical grain contract, showing them on our software how it works, it makes sense to them, right? It's a prescription, right?

Justin Kelly: It's the same as an agronomist would come out and write a prescription for this field, how many pounds of nitrogen, all the different inputs that you have to put in, we try to equate it to that, right? It's the same thing. It's actually, we can control... If you think about revenue, right, it's pretty simple. It's price and yield, that's it. And we put all this input, we put all this work, this energy, into the yield equation, price is equally as important, if not more. We don't throw many resources towards that, right? And so we try to say, as the next 10, 20, $30, an acre that you spend, would be better off worry about price and protecting price than it would be putting more into yield.

Justin Kelly: Because most growers have already, you said this earlier, they know how to grow 250 bushel corn. They do it in droughts, they can do it in floods. It's amazing what, every year... We had a pretty dry six weeks here and the yields came down, but they were still nearly a record. 20 years ago yields would have been down, you know, 10, 15%.

Rodney: That's right.

Justin Kelly: So we’ve gotten pretty darn good at getting a pretty reliable yield. Obviously, there's places every year that struggle, but overall they're pretty good at it. And you throw in subsidized crop insurance, which is just the best tool that's ever been created for a farmer, you can really fine tune your marketing and not be so held captive to well, it's just, I think a lot of growers, unfortunately, it's a coin flip. Might go up, might go down, but you can actually control quite a bit of it.

Rodney: Yeah. That's good. So thinking over your tech side of things, I'm kind of a tech guy. I've used Oak trading platform for sure. I have been using your, I'm sure since day one, your Ag yield price simulator. That is just a fun thing. If I want to add stress to my life, that's a great, safe way to add a little stress to my life. We actually used that at Indigo here last year and had a lot of fun with it, but I've been using that for a long time. I've actually also recommended that to farmers, to be able to see how being more aggressive or more proactive, right? I think it's a good, it's like practice for the real world.

Justin Kelly: Yeah, right.

Rodney: What made you develop that in the first place?

Justin Kelly: I think you alluded to it, education really. I mean, we've had that probably since 2012 range, around there. And dozens of schools continue to use it every year as part of their curriculum, meaning colleges. We do intercollegiate championship contests. So, not to reinvent the wheel, a lot of what... When I went through college, Microsoft was free, right? If you wanted Microsoft office that was free as a college student. They weren't stupid. I learned, I grew up learning Excel and Word and all the things that I use today, and I'm not going to change now.

Justin Kelly: So a lot of it was a little selfish, but also trying to help. We knew that lack of education was a big reason that our industry struggles with marketing and grain advisory, so we wanted to help out with that. And we went to the Ag schools, and there's high schools that use it. And like I said, we've run competitions. I think you guys even ran one to the public or somebody.

Rodney: Yeah, I think you're right.

Justin Kelly: It's fun. People learn how to use crop insurance, how to use these different tools. And you put a competition in it, it makes a little fun.

Rodney: Is the target for like younger users, like potential farmers to grow that business and understand the kind of the younger generation? Or was it meant for existing customers to practice your tools? Just curious.

Justin Kelly: We knew, when we created AgYield, we knew that the industry wasn't ready for it yet. We knew we were probably early and we were. Probably about, we were more early than I thought. We're probably about a decade earlier I think. Now we've really started seeing since, last five years, where that younger generation is transitioning to the farm.

Justin Kelly: The older generation, a lot of them don't want to change. They made it this far, they've done well. They know if they had another 20 years that they would have to do these things. They want their kids or grandkids to do these things. They know that you won't survive the next 30 years if you don't adapt.

Justin Kelly: So that's why we hit the colleges first. And we did, we've had lots of clients that came off the college, showed it to their dad or granddad and ended up being clients. So it's worked organically that way. But yeah, to your point, we knew that we had to hit that generation, the ones that are just now starting to take over the reins.

Justin Kelly: Got to hit that generation, the ones that are just now starting to take over the reins. They can't afford, the assets are too big, the liabilities are too big. They can't afford to have a gut feel and do marketing like their dad or granddad did 30, 40 years ago.

Rodney: That's right. Our producer Ryan just reminded me that maybe not everybody listening knows exactly what that simulator is. You want to give us a brief summary of what that is and how it works?

Justin Kelly: So our AgYield simulator, it's basically the same software that we use for our consulting clients. So it's the AgYield software platform. We restructure it, so it's a closed system and what it does, it's got all the same tools. But it simulates a growing season, simulates market prices, simulates weather, simulates USDA reports. So pretty sophisticated, it took me quite a while to program it, but it's got-

Rodney: Did you code it? Did you code it?

Justin Kelly: I designed it, I'm not a coder.

Rodney: Okay. Yeah. All right.

Justin Kelly: I had the guys code it, but I had to design it all.

Rodney: Yep.

Justin Kelly: So what it does is, you start a simulation, you can compete with up to a couple 100 different players if you will. Everybody starts at the same spot, they get the same amount of acres, corn and bean acres. They can buy crop insurance, not buy crop insurance, make different decisions. So basis fluctuates throughout that simulated growing season and so you can speed it up or slow it down however you want. So basically it simulates from March 1st till November 1st. So a growing season, right?

Rodney: Mm-hmm.

Justin Kelly: It's 36 weeks, so typically it progresses every 12 hours, you can change that. So it's about an 18 day program or a competition and every day the markets are moving, crop insurance acts just like it would normally, your yields are fluctuating, your basis is changing. So we try to simulate as close as you can to what an actual grower has to go through. So every week you get sales reports like you would from the USDA, you get monthly supply and demand estimates like you would from WASDE. All the things that we try to factor in as a grower, as a consultant, you can do that. So the kids in colleges or high schools can do that. Like I said, we've had lots of competitions for growers. So it's been funny when we get comments back when these end is... I think one of the funniest ones, we had a big grower competition, a couple of 100 growers and they speculated a little too much. The thing about it as you see a leaderboard, so you can see how much everyone's making or losing.

Rodney: That's right.

Justin Kelly: So this grower was just getting beat up pretty bad, he tried to speculate a little too hard and he's like, "Can you just take me off this thing? It's pretty embarrassing looking at myself every day."

Rodney: That's right.

Justin Kelly: Because he was part of a group, but it's real and I think a lot them kind of connect the dots. Like, "Man, I make those same mistakes when I'm managing my own farm." It's just this speeds it up a little bit.

Rodney: That's right. Where would a grower go to sign up for something like that today or how can a guy get in that?

Justin Kelly: Yeah. You can contact info@agyield.com and we have periodic competitions. Generally, you can't just go in there and play it by yourself. It's usually open enrollment or any educators that want it, we give it for free. So we had lots of colleges and classrooms that use it, they just contact us every year, we set up a custom game for them and then they can... We even have ones where they can manually progress it. So if they just want to progress it while they're in class, they can do that, they can discuss, "Hey, what kind of stuff are you guys doing?" So it's pretty dynamic for whatever somebody wants, but to your point, they can't just go in there and play a simulation. Part of that to be honest with you is there's only so many simulations. So when we do these-

Rodney: Sure.

Justin Kelly: Open enrollment competitions, we don't want somebody to know what the outcome is going to be. So we-

Rodney: Yeah, that's right. What other technology have you developed that maybe I'm not as aware of?

Justin Kelly: Yeah, so I mean our common platform AgYield, that's where we really design strategies and stuff like that for our growers. One of the I think more sophisticated tools is called Athena, it's kind of an AI that we developed. So if you think about a consultant, they take in all your farm data, your expenses, what your goals are and try to find strategies that fit within that. Problems is there's trillions of combinations of cash, brain marketing, futures options. It's impossible to find the best strategy and so we develop what's called Athena or a basically plug that into AgYield. The grower or the consultant can go in there and plug in all their hopes and dreams, right? I want this kind of a return, I want to have this much upside, I have this much money that I can use for hedging. Then what it does is, it takes in all that data and finds strategies for you. So kick back, if it can find a strategy that satisfies all that, if it can get you a $50 an acre positive return, you still can make $250 an acre and you don't want margin calls.

Justin Kelly: You can plug all that in there and if it finds a strategy, it kicks it out and it shows you and then you can visually see that in our software how it's going to perform. If it doesn't find a strategy, what's cool is it will run every night. So you might put a [inaudible 00:23:23] in there and say, if it finds something let me know and let's say it like, this is a good example. This year corn rallies, 30, 40 cents, three months later, boom, Athena finds a strategy it kicks it out.

Rodney: Yep.

Justin Kelly: So it's constantly looking over your account, which is nice. So it's not just, "Hey, I want to strategy where I can get a $4.50 Well, anybody can do that. It factors in all of your open positions, all your cash brain sales, your local basis. So it's customized just to your farm. So that's a pretty sophisticated tool that we have that we're pretty proud of.

Rodney: Details. Are using the bid or the ask on that when you're pricing those up or how do you deal with that problem?

Justin Kelly: We use settlements just to make that to your point.

Rodney: Just use settlements, yep.

Justin Kelly: There's so many strike prices that you don't want to get a bad recommendation. So we found the cleanest ways to use settlements so that it's consistent with where you can get it done.

Rodney: Gotcha. Then, can I place my order through the platform as well when it comes up with the strategy?

Justin Kelly: Yeah. We manually do that now, so you'd have to call us to place it, just because liability reasons.

Rodney: Yeah, sure.

Justin Kelly: Regulatory reasons, but yeah.

Rodney: Yep.

Justin Kelly: Yep. What happens is you get a PDF report that tells you all about the strategy, the pros, the cons, maps out how it performed, and then if you want to execute it we execute it for you.

Rodney: Yeah. Curious, this leaderboard thing, have you guys ever thought about taking your customers and putting a leaderboard on your AgYield so everybody can see where they compete?

Justin Kelly: Yeah. One of the things that we do is we have several different, I'll call them large farmer groups that we work with and in our platform we have benchmarking. So if you're a normal AgYield client, you can go in there and you can see everything from your cost per bushel, your marketing decisions, what percent hedged you are. You can see where you are versus the average of all AgYield growers. Right? So that's been something that people like, "Where do I fit in all this? The average yield growers, 43% sold I'm only 10%, why is that?" So that's been nice. These other groups, they can also add another column so we could link it where my group of 50 growers, we want to share that data. So they can see not only where they are against the average AgYield grower, but they can see where they are versus the average of their group of growers. Even some of those groups take it further and say, "Hey, once a month..." They get a print out of everybody's and they talk about why did you do this? Why did you do that?

Justin Kelly: So they do pull the curtain back and share it within that select group. But even I'll say even in that case, whenever they get calls two or three days like, "Oh." They feel anxious about having to share that, because they didn't do so well and where their buddy's going to think of that. So they're very sensitive to any sharing, right? Unfortunately everyone's embarrassed, they all think they might be one person in the coffee shop of how great they are. But in reality they're a little ashamed of what they've done. I think it's natural, right? They're all friends, but they're all competing, right?

Rodney: Mm-hmm.

Justin Kelly: Especially the higher level grower, they're competing on the same acre. Last thing they want is anybody to know anything about them.

Rodney: Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. So I've been invited a couple of times to some groups of farmers that have joined these cohorts, where... They're actually not related. So I think what's interesting about these groups, is they get people from all over the country that maybe they've met at Top Producer, something like that. They-

Rodney: Top producer, something like that. They join these groups and they do a similar thing. So they go around once every couple... Maybe a quarter, they'll go to each other's farms, open up the books, really look at these things. I've had a chance to be a part of this. This is the most humbling thing I've ever seen. To open up your books and say, "Hey, my house expense is X." It goes down to that detail. But what I've seen is it takes a special kind of farmer to do that. It takes a special kind of person to want to do that. And the result of those guys is they learn a ton and they seem to be the most successful people that I know about. Any feedback on that? Are you seeing that inside the program?

Justin Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. And it's the ones that... Look, you're running a business, and the more you can learn about how to be better at that, the better you're going to be. Typically, what I see, the ones that are the best at agronomy, the ones that really run it, they're a business owner, they're not a tractor driver. It's all about the numbers at the end of the day. Obviously, they have a passion for farming but they run it like a business so they take marketing the same way. To your point, 10 40 was a great sale for you, I'm sure. Made a lot of money and they move on. Okay, so what, it's 11 40 right now, right?

Rodney: Right.

Justin Kelly: Those that are making more sales are worried about next year now, and now they're like okay, we finally had this opportunity where I can lock in multiple years of profitability. That's how you run a business. If Apple had the ability to go forward contract 10 years of iPhones at $800 a piece, they would.

Rodney: You bet they would. That's right.

Justin Kelly: Farmers can do that. And they don't. So yeah, all these groups I've worked prior with some of the ones that you're talking about and it makes them better for it. It's no different than you have these peer groups of CEOs that get together periodically and talk about their businesses. This is what they are, they're CEOs. And they're getting together and this is what worked for me. What do you guys think about cover crops? This was my return. And they're trying to get better and to your point, when you're not competing against that grower in your backyard, you're willing to open up because they're not a threat.

Rodney: Justin, this has been a ton of fun, man. I could spend a lot of time with you for sure. What didn't I ask you about that you were hoping to discuss?

Justin Kelly: I would say, how we do business. We run a lot of our programs through Indigo, like I said. It's pretty slick. We take a 401k approach where we ask you a bunch of questions about your goals. You can enroll. We have series of different programs. So based on how you answer those questions, you could be more aggressive, less aggressive, like you would manage a stock portfolio and you can get into array of different programs that you customize. And then you can enroll bushels. We're constantly changing how that works so we're going to be getting to the point where they can go right there. We think we're going to have it where they could even run a Faena and execute it via cash green contract. So they can really customize it to their farm.

Justin Kelly: So we're constantly trying to develop new tools that are cognizant of the fact that everybody doesn't have tens of thousands of dollars to margin in their own hedge account but they still want the customization that comes with having your own trading account. So we're working on that. In fact, we're always trying to change it. They can get a hold of us anytime and find out more about different options that we do have. Whether they want a brokerage account, whether they don't and hopefully we can help some people out.

Rodney: Yeah. I think that's a shift I've seen in the Managed Pricing Program just with Indigo in general. So, I worked for Cargo for a long time. Pro pricing was probably one of the first contracts like that. At least industry-wide like that. And to be able to see programs like yours roll through our system where it's high risk, low risk or those different levels of conservatism, rather than just hey, one guy trading a position, I'm going to hang my hat on him. That's been really interesting to see. I love that approach. So I appreciate you running that through us.

Justin Kelly: Wherever you want to deliver that grain, we don't care. We're going to try to help facilitate that. And I think it goes to a lot of these programs that are out there like traditional brokerage firms, it's all about some person's opinion. And if they were so good at trading, they'd be trading themselves. I think if you're ever going to enroll bushels into a managed program, you should learn a lot about how they manage it, how they come up with strategies. And you've seen bad cases out there where prices were going to go down a bunch so they get super aggressive and had a bad outcome. So it's all about just like you would with a portfolio management of your 401k, you want to get into something that's going to manage it like you expect.

Rodney: Yeah, that's right. And I don't follow the grain markets daily like I used to for sure but I think when I'm looking for a advisor on something like that, I'm not looking for a guy that says, "Hey, I know what this market's going to do," for exactly your reason. Like what are you doing here? No chance. Right. I want the guy that says, "Hey, I don't know what this market's going to do, but I can give you the edge. I can see that there's a 3 billion bushel carry out, that tells me something." Or something else. I assume you're using stuff like that.

Justin Kelly: Oh, absolutely. That comes back to plan B versus plan A like look, everything's lining up right now or markets look like they could be pretty bullish for a little period here, but let's not lose sight on things can change on a dime just as fast as it went from 320 to 420, something could change or the next African swine fever outbreak, the next COVID lockdown. And one of your questions you sent earlier, we might've had four black swan events in the past two years.

Rodney: That's unbelievable.

Justin Kelly: Pretty crazy things if you really think about what's happened to our markets, between swine fever, we've went from major demand bear market to a major demand bull market in six months. I mean, things change. So…

Rodney: I was on a panel yesterday where we recapped 2020 grain marketing, negative oil prices didn't even make the slideshow presentation. It wasn't even top of mind.

Justin Kelly: That wasn't even the story we saw.

Rodney: No, that's right.

Justin Kelly: Good point.

Rodney: Justin, again, thanks so much for being on the show today. This is a ton of fun. I hope we get to do it again. Justin, again, president and founding member of AgYield. AgYield a great partner of Indigo's and they offer a number of Managed Pricing Programs with Indigo. So I'd encourage you to reach out to them or Indigo if you're interested in hearing more. I want to thank everybody for tuning into the GrainWaves Podcast. If you're new to the podcast, remember to subscribe, leave a five star rating and share with your friends and family. Thanks Justin.

Justin Kelly: Thank you. Really appreciate it.

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