Buy it before it is drilled, and pay less for the nerve.
A patch bought in September, before a single seed goes in the ground, costs about fifteen per cent less than the same patch bought in May when it is standing there looking healthy. You are being paid for taking the earlier end of the risk, and for nothing else.
This is still a forward sale of goods
Plotting is a fixed-price forward purchase of produce, delivered in kind. It is not an investment, there is no cash return, no profit share, and no secondary market. We are emphatic about this because the alternative — paying people a cash share of a harvest they had no hand in managing — is an unauthorised collective investment scheme under section 235 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, and a criminal offence.
Why an earlier price is a lower price.
Between September and May a crop passes through drilling, establishment, winter, and the point at which anybody can tell whether it is any good. Every one of those is a chance for it to fail.
If you buy in September you are carrying all of that. If you buy in May you are carrying almost none of it, because by then the ear count is known and the crop is essentially made. The price difference is the value of that certainty, and it is calculated the same way every year rather than being set by whatever we think we can get.
What the discount is not is a return. You do not get more produce for buying early; you get the same stated quantity for less money. That distinction is the entire reason this page exists rather than a nicer-sounding one about growth.
The same patch, at four points in the year.
| When you buy | What is known | Price of patch B2 | What you are carrying |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early September, pre-drilling | Nothing. The plan, and the field. | £187 | Everything — establishment, winter, spring, harvest |
| Late October, post-emergence | Establishment count. Whether it came up at all. | £199 | Winter, spring and harvest |
| February, post-tillering | The yield ceiling for the crop. | £210 | Spring drought and harvest weather |
| May, post-ear-count | Essentially the yield. | £220 | Only the weather in the fortnight before cutting |
Buying early gets you a discount. It does not get you a position.
What earlier buying gets you
- A fixed price, lower for buying earlier
- The same stated quantity of produce as a May buyer
- The same shared-risk policy, chosen at purchase
- The tracker from the drilling date onwards
- First refusal on the same patch the following season
What it deliberately does not
- Any extra produce for taking the earlier risk
- Any cash return if the price rises
- Any ability to sell the position on to somebody else
- Any hedge against grain prices, which is a regulated activity
- Any exposure to what the crop is worth on the open market
Where this stops being a farm shop and starts being a bank.
A forward contract on a commodity, entered into for investment purposes, settled in cash or freely transferable, is a regulated financial instrument. Farms use real ones: Euronext milling wheat futures are traded in Paris every day by people hedging exactly this risk, through authorised brokers, under a regulatory regime that exists for good reason.
This is not that, and the differences are structural rather than cosmetic. It settles in goods and only in goods. It is not transferable. It is bought for consumption rather than for gain. There is no cash settlement option, no clearing house, no margin and no leverage.
Take away any one of those and you would need a firm with a Part 4A permission to sell it. We would rather sell flour.
What people ask before they buy blind.
Nothing happens to you. You bought produce, not exposure. The farm carries the market risk because the farm is the one selling into the market.
Before drilling, a full refund. After drilling, nothing, because the cost has been incurred — and that is stated here rather than in a schedule.
No. One season at a time. A multi-year prepayment starts to look like a deposit-taking business, which is a different licence entirely.
The method is. The number is not, because it depends on input costs which have moved by more than fifty per cent in a single year within recent memory.
The grid, as it stands.
Twenty-eight patches, and the nine that have already gone.
