Successful Extension Meetings and Innovative Economic Research: Grain Marketing Simulations

While grain marketing is considered a difficult challenge facing producers every year, it represents a very important component for producers to convert their bushels into dollars and ensure farm survival. Grain marketing involves both strategic behavior and knowledge of the grain market. Local and global supply and demand conditions, grain storage costs, transportation costs etc. present constantly changing risk and reward opportunities for producers. Efficient training and consistent monitoring of the market can help producers reduce risk (i.e., reduce the chance of farm failure) by making good use of pricing opportunities. Since these concepts may not necessarily be intuitive and strategic behavior can often be cognitively taxing, the University of Nebraska- Lincoln has developed an interactive grain marketing simulation game, called Marketing in a New Era (MINE) for this purpose. The first section of this article describes how the MINE simulation game can fit Extension meetings and help Specialists communicate grain marketing principles. The second section describes two example activities from the pre -harvest and post-harvest version of MINE. Screenshots from the simulation interface are included in order to portray how MINE works and why its design enhances the learning process. In the last section, a research idea is proposed that combines Experimental Economics techniques with Grain Marketing intuition, and uses MINE simulation as an experimental tool