Contracts get written, confirmations go out (or should have gone out), trucks roll in, grain gets shipped out, the year marches on... It’s a system held together with an unspoken understanding among everyone involved.
When something unexpected happens, it usually gets resolved. It always does…until it doesn’t.
Every merchandiser has a story about the moment things stopped being automatic; a farmer who didn’t deliver, a misunderstanding over a delivery point, a basis roll that wasn’t properly confirmed, paperwork that never quite made it into the file. It’s rarely a single catastrophic failure. More often, it begins as a small oversight hiding in plain sight, growing sharper teeth with each passing day
This is where the real gap reveals itself, the distance between how the trade actually operates and how the NGFA Trade Rules Booklet expects it to work. On most days, that gap is invisible. But the moment a dispute lands on someone’s desk, that gap becomes everything. The rules are clear, but the world of day-to-day merchandising is not conducive of precision. Merchandisers live in a world of speed. The NGFA lives in a world of documentation. And when those two worlds collide, the result is rarely graceful.
I’ve seen companies enter arbitration genuinely believing they had a slam-dunk case, only to discover they lacked the one thing the NGFA cares about most: documentation. Not belief, not habit, not “that’s how we’ve always done it,” not “he knew what he owed,” not “we texted about it.” Documentation, not in the conversational sense, but in the procedural sense. The kind that comes from intentional discipline, consistent communication, and a workflow that treats compliance as a feature, not a chore.
In the grain industry, that documentation becomes even more critical because it doesn’t spread risk between more participants. Farms and grain companies consolidate, balance sheets expand, operations become more corporate, and each load, each contract, each missed confirmation carries more financial weight. What used to be a $50,000 misunderstanding is now a mid-six to mid-seven figure exposure. A dispute that once could’ve been solved over coffee now spirals into arbitration, months of back-and-forth, and the nerve-racking uncertainty of whether the decision, win or lose, can even be collected.
The NGFA is still operating off the principles that built this industry, but the scale of the industry has changed. Counter-party risk has concentrated, and compliance infrastructure has not kept pace. Too many rely on unwritten norms and an unspoken belief that good intentions will win the day.
But the truth is: arbitration doesn’t care about intentions. It cares about clarity. And clarity is often the first casualty when disputes arise and you’re forced to look back 18 months at someone else’s notes…just ask our entrepreneurial clients who try to put business relationships in place without documenting them, only to later regret that they didn’t ask for our help because of the lack of clarity that can come when things don’t go as expected.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that simply ordering the 2026 NGFA Trade Rules booklet and placing it on the corner of a desk is no longer a risk-management strategy. Knowing what the rules say is not the same as having a system to ensure they are followed.
Fewer sleepless nights will belong to the management teams that recognize the gap and choose to close it before they’re forced to. The dollar amounts aren’t getting smaller. Arbitration files aren’t getting shorter. Risk isn’t thinning out. And the consequences aren’t getting any easier to swallow.
Something has to fill the space between “how we trade grain” and “how disputes are resolved.” Something that sits between habit and procedure, between handshake and evidence, between good faith and enforceability. Whether that’s more corporate intentionality or hiring counsel to provide training and compliance audits, the landscape is getting steeper, ready or not.
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