I hate this day

It's prepay time. I shudder to think about it. With herbicide, seed, and starter the inputs this year are hugging $200/acre. I jockeyed a little banking on being able to get into wet fields and save one round of Liberty spray but those acres will need pre emergent on them.

After looking down the barrel of that gun I decided that I should be planning on another hundred head of cattle - diversify even more. I just don't know how the guys that live in their spray coupe are making ends meet. Chemical costs are just getting insane. Makes me wish that 12 row mounted cultivator for the 4440 was still around here. I can justify a lot of diesel at this rate.

I have NO idea what you are talking about, BUT, it doesn't sound good for you. Keep your pecker up !

Yes, notair, I certainly has taken the fun out of farming.

Add to that $250 per acre rent up front too....OUCH!!

Ben

very interesting,,dont know much about it,,best of luck and thanks for some education,,,no one can pay the high land rent for long can they?

I can empathize. I own a small piece of farmland in Iowa, and I gave up on sharing the up-front costs of fertilizer, seed, pre-emergence treatment, etc., with the person who farms the land and instead have gone to cash rent. If he has a great year, that's great. If it's a bad year, too bad. I might sacrifice some potential income in a year that has good yields and good grain prices, but I just don't need the hassle of sorting out and paying my share of the expenses on a repeated basis. Best wishes to you for a good year.

Kinda like the early to mid 80s. I had to make a decision on what ground I even wanted to keep working. I was renting some marginal ground that just wasn't worth working anymore.

A couple years ago if we had a good year we could get $1000 of corn off an acre of corn.

Because farmers were able to make so much, the cost of fertilizer, rent, and machinery rose very quickly to 'take' most of that gross in me away.

Still, it was a profitable time for many for 4-5 years.

Grain prices rose so fast and high because of our poor economy in USA (China could buy our crops instead of South Americas, due to the low USA dollar value), and then there was a really really historically bad year of crop failures in a couple of the corn growing states, making corn - and wheat and soybeans - in a very tight supply.

Now, we and more so the rest of the world used those high prices to get better, farm more land, and produce record amounts of grain all around the globe. The USA dollar has also gotten stronger so it is harder to export our grains, and China is having some financial difficulty so they are not willing to pay much for the grain they need to import.

Pit all together, we are probably going to get about 1/2 for our grains this fall of what we got 3 years ago.

However, fertilizer has only dropped a small percent in value, machinery dealers are charging more for labor and parts, seed costs are the same, and town folks renting land want the same rent for their property.

It is not a fun year to crop farm.

I also notice grocery store and restaurant prices have not dropped a bit; they are still going up?

For a time A couple years ago I could sell my corn for over $7 a bushel.

Today it is worth $3.19 a bu.

Kinda like if your grocery bill went up a little, your mortgage payment stayed the same, but your salary was cut to 45%.

You would not be in a good mood either.

Paul

Are we talking corn because 200 dollars per acre sounds a bit low? One of Pioneer's value numbers is 250 dollars for an 80K kernel bag. Fertilizer depending when you lock in will most likely be around 125-140 per acre locally.

We are going to conventionally farm the wheat on wheat this summer. The Corn and Milo needs the chemicals. Hard to cultivate 20 inch rows behind the air seeder, for the Milo, and the Corn is planted on ground that NEEDS sprayed t control Shatter Cane.

Sold a lot of corn for less than that back in the 70's and early 80's.

The 90s were worse for me, wet corn, after drying I got almost a buck a bu......

Fert, fuel, taxes, rent was all a lot less then, but it weren't no fun then either.

Farming is always a cycle, we are heading into the bad side of the cycle again. We all know it, just part of the business.

The fella I responded to sounded like he didnt know.

Paul

I cash rent my farm{Iowa} at a good price,so this year as needing a tax break and low comodity prices and not haveing to negociatate rental price, I bought lime to be spread this spring or when ever the ground freezes. Not only helps me but also my renter.

Calls to mind that saying about how during a gold rush you want to be the one selling the shovels.

Until the Saudis quit pumping the oil skyrockets, putting diesel back to close to $4 or more.

I'm assuming that you've been doing this long enough to know that this is the way it goes in commodity based farming. In the lifespan of a farming career, it's a break-even business, if you're good, and that is that. I ain't lecturing, I've just been hearing a lot of whining lately, not necessarily on here, but in the neighborhood. It's time to suck it up, tighten the belt, get creative and move forward.

Prepay by buying a huge fuel tank. Given the crazy camel jockeys in the Middle East it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Iran drops a couple hundred bombs on the Saudis in the next couple weeks. $1.70 a gallon gas will be a distant memory.

I do too! I just got my tax bill, for my property.

Yup, you wanna see long faces, just look at any New Yorker when the county taxes come due. You don't any more than catch your breath from the school taxes and then get drilled in the butt again.

Funny, I agree with you of course, but what's funny is I was thinking of you at 3:30 and was gonna post a post for you and ask if we're reddy to be porked! Lol

Right. You better have saved some of that money from 2-3 years ago as you're going to need it for the next 2-3 years.