Effectively buying US food and feed grains can benefit those individuals in private companies who are new to US and international marketing, as well as to those with a moderate understanding of marketing.
Grain purchasing concepts This course was offered at the IGP Institute Conference Centre and included a visit to the Cargill Westwego export facility on the Mississippi River in New Orleans, Louisiana. Participants in this course learned how grain is traded and exported during the first week. This included USDA grading standards and how they are implemented, how to read USDA reports, how to establish a proper contract to get what you desire, international grain trade rules and international contracts and arbitration systems. “With the interaction of the personnel from IGP and our teammates, I really think that we’ve not only built a strong relationship between all of us, but we’ve learned a lot from each other and each other’s experiences,” says Kamal Dieck, commercial director of Beneficio Dieck. “Since it’s such a diverse group, you have wheat millers and managers, executives and people from both trading and purchasing departments. It really gives you a lot of great and useful knowledge of different aspects of the business.” Participants in the course were primarily from Central and
USSEC and the IGP Institute team up to provide training course in feed and poultry nutrition for Japanese participants.
Feed and poultry nutrition course Recently, the Kansas State University IGP Institute hosted a group from Japan to learn about feed and poultry nutrition. The US Soybean Export Council (USSEC)–KSU Japan Feed and Poultry Nutrition training was held for eight industry professionals June 12–16, 2017. This collaboration was done with USSEC organising the group, the Kansas Soybean Commission helping sponsor the course, and the IGP Institute at Kansas State University hosting the group and providing the technical training. The course covered a variety of topics that discussed both sides of feed and poultry nutrition. These topics included digestive tract structure integrity and efficiency, broiler breeder nutrition and management, feeding laying hens under heat stress and stressful conditions, ideal amino acid profile and requirements for broilers and layers, maintaining quality when importing US grain and mycotoxin control, quality control on a feed mill and pelleting process for poultry feed production. Koji Gondo, Nihon Nosan, Yokohama, Japan commented, “I really enjoyed learning about the poultry nutrition from all of the professors in the course. I am in poultry nutrition in my company so I will be able to use this information from the course for my corporation.” Along with classroom lectures and discussions, participants were also toured the O.H. Kruse Feed Technology Innovation Center in Manhattan, Kansas; Bill Manville’s farm near Winchester, Kansas; Midwest Ag Enterprises in Kansas City, Kansas; DeLong Container
South America, the US and India. The participants from India were most interested in learning how to import high quality US hard red winter wheat. The group also traveled to New Orleans to tour an export facility along the Mississippi River and apply their classroom knowledge to real-life operations. During the second week of the course, the group focused on commodity price risk management. Topics in this section included the workings of commodity exchanges, futures and options trading, hedging and price risk management, discussions on forward contracting and options and over-the-counter (OTC) contracts and how they are applied to a risk management strategy.
Facility near Edgerton, Kansas; and a poultry farm near Syracuse, Missouri. Carlos Campabadal. Course coordinator and IGP’s feed manufacturing and grain quality management specialist explained, “The USSEC Japan Poultry course is a great example on how collaboration between organisations to enhance the usage and awareness of US soybean and soybean meal to an international market.” He continued, “We hope that they had an excellent experience in Kansas and that they are able to apply their knowledge at their respective companies.”
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