milofarmer, I will say if you're making any marketing decisions off anything I say, you're probably in for a world of hurt. I put my thoughts up here for them to be torn apart so that I can hopefully develop a more accurate perspective of what is going on. I hope that I'm getting better on marketing, but that remains to be seen.

Also, for full disclosure, I am not growing nearly as much wheat next year as I have the last two years. It has nothing to do with price though. I would not be afraid to plant most of it to wheat this fall again if that's how my rotation was working. In general, I do not base my rotation on price at drilling, planting or any other time, I base my rotation on what I think will make the most bushels for me over the long run.

With all that being said, the reason I say it has been a 7 year bear market is as follows. Up until February of 2008 we had been experiencing higher highs and higher lows. Since that time we have experienced lower highs and lower lows. Yes, there have been good opportunities to price wheat (although in my opinion, for our area and average yeilds, not very profitable compared to corn prices during the same time frames), but the price of wheat was clearly no longer in a long term bull market during that time period.

Another way to look at it is for the 5 years leading up to 2008, if you had sold multiple years worth of your wheat production during a rally, it would have been a terrible decision. The hammer method worked well during that time period. Ever since 2008 though, a guy would have been well served to sell multiple years worth of production every time we had a rally.

I'm looking forward to a period where I don't have to constantly be looking forward to when I need to sell my wheat production ahead of harvest, even by as much as a year or two. Instead, I could wait until harvest or after and not regret the fact that I didn't contract my expected production a year or two ago. In other words, I like the idea of hammer marketing a lot better than I like having to deal with a bear market.