Barchart Builds Mobile Trading App for Farmers
The corn might be high as an elephant’s eye, but what’s it selling for? Now there’s an app for that.
AgriCharts, a division of Barchart, has developed a mobile application for farmers which includes intraday prices for both cash grain and grain futures, along with charts, news, video and weather. More than 14,000 farmers in the U.S. and Canada have downloaded the app, which makes it easier for farmers to make a decision about when and how they should sell their crops.
“By having both local cash grain bids and futures prices on the same app, farmers can quickly make marketing decisions no matter where they are,” said Mark Haraburda, managing director of Chicagobased Barchart. “If they want to sell physical corn to a local elevator they have the pricing at their fingertips. And if they want to hedge with futures they have those prices as well.”
The app uses zip code or GPS coordinates to source local cash grain bids. The app also integrates information from Google Maps to locate nearby elevators, send offers from their phone or desktop and then automatically keep track of the offer status. “The consolidated local pricing we provide defragments an otherwise highly fragmented marketplace,” Haraburda explained.
The AgMobile app was rolled out in November and the cash grain prices were added in March. The company also rolled out an online platform in April for trading physical grain that is hosted by Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of Amazon.
