I'll quickly summarize the "netting game". The problem you are facing is, you are doing (1), but not doing (2) and (3). Doing (1) perfectly is part of becoming a better player, you will find that strong players get ahead and stay ahead during (1).
Stage 1: Country growth
The goal here is to grow your country's size, and economy.
Stage 2: Stocking
Once your country is large enough, you will reach a point where growing larger is counter-productive. So from this point on, all you do is hit the CASH (or TECH if techer) button and keep all the goods you produce in food form. (i.e sell your products, buy food, store food on market). This is called stocking.
Stage 3: Destocking
Near the end of the reset, you sell all your food in stages, and buy massive amounts of military with the money from selling the stockpile of food you amassed. Different strategies will sell food differently, some sell to public market, some sell to private market. Different strategies also buy all that military differently, some buy from public market, some buy from private market, or a mixture of both.
Q: Why do we stock?
We stock because military upkeep is expensive. If we were to just hit the CASH button, and use the earnings that day to buy military, military upkeep will overwhelm us quickly. So we keep our Networth low, and stock food. Only in the last 2 days of the reset, then we dump all that food, and jump in NW. This minimizes the amount of turns we spend in high upkeep.
Q: Why do we stock food?
We stock food because there is a limit of 2b cash that you can hold on hand. If you hold more than 2b cash, the portion of cash above 2b will "decay" at the rate of 0.1% per turn. For example, if you have 5.2b cash on hand, 0.1% of 3.2b will decay every turn, that is, you will lose 3.2m cash every turn for no good reason. This cash decay is called CORRUPTION.
To avoid corruption, we buy bushels and keep our cash just below 2b. All food on hand also decay (at the same 0.1% rate), to avoid this, we store the bushels on the public market at an "unsellable price" such as $200 dollars. Food that is on the market or en-route the market does not decay.
Q: When do we start stocking?
You start stocking when the costs of gaining new land exceeds what you expect to get back from that extra land's production over the remainder of the reset. Yes, this means doing some math, and knowing the production formulas. See
http://www.earthempires.com/...estion-32278?t=1405158323 for details.