Now Available: 2009 Corn, Soybean and Wheat Crop Budgets

Budgeting helps guide farmers through the decision making process to commit resources to the most profitable enterprises on the farm. Crops or Livestock? Corn, Soybeans, or Wheat? We can begin to answer these questions with well thought out budgets that include all revenue and costs. Without some form of budgeting and some method to track your enterprises’ progress you’ll have difficulty determining your most profitable enterprise(s) and if you’ve met your goals for the farm.

Budgeting is often described as “penciling it out” before committing resources to a plan. Ohio State University Extension has had a long history of developing “Enterprise Budgets” that can be used as a starting point for producers in their budgeting process.

Newly updated Enterprise Budgets for 2009 have been completed and posted to the Farm Management Website of the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics. Updated Enterprise Budgets can be viewed and downloaded from the following website:
http://aede.osu.edu/Programs/FarmManagement/Budgets/

Enterprise Budgets updated so far for 2009 include: Corn-Conservation Tillage; Soybeans-No-Till (Roundup Ready); Wheat-Conservation Tillage, (Grain & Straw).
Our enterprise budgets are compiled on downloadable Excel Spreadsheets that contain macros for ease of use. Users can input their own production and price levels to calculate their own numbers. These Enterprise Budgets have a new look with color coded cells that will enable users to plug in numbers to easily calculate bottoms lines for different scenarios. Detailed footnotes are included to help explain methodologies used to obtain the budget numbers. Starting this year we will be updating these Enterprise Budgets periodically during the year is large changes occur in price or costs. Budgets will include a date in the upper right hand corner of the front page indicating when the last update occurred.

In addition to the newly release 2009 budgets, all of the 2008 Enterprise Budgets are available in Excel and PDF format on the OSU Farm Management Budget Website (http://aede.osu.edu/Programs/FarmManagement/Budgets/): these budgets include: corn, sobyeans, wheat, alfalfa hay, grass hay, corn silage, sweet corn (retail and wholesale), popcorn, steer, heifer, cow-calf, ewe and lamb, and dairy cow.

The Budgets are complied by Barry Ward, Assistant Professor Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics, Ohio State University.

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