“We’re looking beyond the marketing risks aspects of farming and looking at more of the strategic risks, and the tactical risks and relationship risks.”
She told HAT that Purdue is a natural partner for a venture like this.
“They have the intellectual capital, the ability to put together the kind of information that we need to deliver to farmers. They also have a pretty good history of delivering to farmers, so it was just a natural fit for us.”
Leeck added, “Three years ago our farmers started to see there would be challenging times in agriculture, so they directed us to start looking for opportunities to figure out how we could help them manage through tough times. It’s very unfortunate in many regards that we’re seeing some more challenging times in agriculture right now, but at the same time it’s good timing for us to launch a program like this.”
The website is https://www.farmriskresources.com/ and farmers will be able use the web tools to learn more about the risks they actually face in their own operations.
“There are four cases studies on there that are based on real farms in Indiana. There are also some tools that ask them some questions and suggest to them what kind of additional information they would need to seek based on the type of responses they have and what kind of risk they may be exposed to. We’re still in the infancy of it. There’s so much more possibility but we’ve made a great step of getting a lot of materials developed over the past few years, and now we finally have a place, a website that we can launch and we can get that interaction with the farmer audience we’re targeting.”
Leeck is the ISA director of grain marketing. The new website was launched last week during Commodity Classic and the Indiana soybean checkoff organization sponsored a booth at Classic in addition to a Saturday morning presentation by Purdue.