CHICAGO, Ill. — AgriCharts, an information and technology provider for agribusinesses, has announced a new online venture directed at farmers called Grains.com

Grains.com is an online marketplace for farmers and grain buyers. It gives farmers the ability to connect to grain elevators in North America and view their local grain bids. Farmers can then send grain elevators offers to sell their grain, including corn, soybeans and wheat.

Users can also use the service to check futures prices, agricultural news and weather. Grains.com is available via any device, including desktop, tablet or cell phone; registration is free.

AgriCharts already had a product called AgPlus, before it started the Grains.com venture, said Eero Pikat, president of Barchart, the company behind AgriCharts. AgPlus was a recently launched grain offer system.

At some point, the company realized it had to rewrite the computer code for AgPlus, Pikat explained. At that point, it decided to add an information service component to the product and then rename the combined service. This is what became Grains.com

The company made the announcement June 15.

Pikat said Grains.com doesn’t compete with any of the grain commodity exchanges such as Minneapolis Grain Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade or Kansas City Board of Trade. Those companies do futures contracts, Pikat said. Grains.com "works in conjunction with the exchanges. We pilot tested the service already. It’s a brand new product, but we already have about 500 producers now who will be migrating to this product (from AgPlus).

"I think this is going to be the future. We’re different because we’re doing this from the perspective of the sophisticated producer rather than the elevator. We’re empowering the farmer so he can see who all the elevators are around him so he can see who he wants to deal with. What our product offers is the transaction between the farmer and the grain elevator."

Pikat explained other similar services allow a user to access a system that belongs to the grain elevator without offering a platform that’s independent. Grains.com is currently connected to 1,500-2,000 grain elevators. He said there’s no reason for a grain elevator not to be connected to the Grains.com system.

Grains.com features include local grain elevator prices; buying and selling of grain online; an interactive elevator map tool; delayed or real-time futures quotes and charts; real-time agriculture news; and local weather conditions, forecasts and maps.

According to the announcement, Grains.com is built on Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure, which provides a "highly reliable platform" to deploy the service to tens of thousands of farmers in the United States and Canada. Pikat said the company is exploring the possibility of offering a service where farmers could sell some of their grain right away at current futures prices, but hold some back as a hedge in case futures prices should rise later.

To look into the Grains.com system or to start a free account, visit www.grains.com and to find out more about the parent company, visit www.barchart.com