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Central GA | I don’t feel like the soybean price is that unprofitable with a big caveat: the cost of equipment, repairs, labor, disk blades, property taxes,etc. needs to not increase another nickel, or it won’t be worth the effort to grow a crop. Parts and repairs seem to have gone up the most. I honestly don’t feel like seed, chemical, and fertilizer prices are that terrible. Seeing county bureaucrats, sales reps, etc. roll up in brand new trucks and SUVs doesn’t sit well with me.
We double crop soy beans behind wheat, and Canola and it pencils out decent. Some ground is going on 10 years like this. We got out of cotton Four years ago, but have all the equipment. We do some corn, but don’t have a dryer and get tired of all the Trucking and waiting in line. But we pretty much only use poultry Litter and a one pass herbicide program if possible s and run “older” nice equipment (all rtk but pre-def) Storing soy beans for a few months let us get a better price so that helps. Bottom line is we can weather a lot of uncertainty but sone costs are getting out of sight.looking at $25-75k of offseason repairs- nothing major but seems like anything is 4 figures anymore. $600 header drive pulley that used to be $185 not 6 years ago……
Our marketing strategy focuses on selling some crop anytime prices are profitable. On farm storage and a few semi’s helps with the strategy, but you have to keep the cost down. Most of our crop gets delivered at harvest though on forward contracts equal to 90% of APH. If it’s a good year, we’ll have a fair amount to sell during market bumps.
I take my schedule F expenses and divide by the number of acres that I formed that year and that gives you a realistic cost of production per bushel using your APH. Not a perfect accounting but gets you pretty close. All our crops cost about the same for inputs, but if we have cotton or corn, I’ll weigh them a little heavier in my calculations.
So that’s my grain production tactics, I cant control the weather or markets so minimizing other risks is all I can do.
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Grain Production business tactics
