CropChoice – 2017

 

 

The latest edition of CropChoice$ is ready for your use in your crop planning.  With the latest data, planning is even more customized to the producer’s current operation. CropChoice$  helps producers choose the best crops for their operation and their bottom line.

 

 

 

“CropChoice$ is an advanced crop budgeting software tool that’s updated annually with recent crop insurance information from Agricultural Financial Services Corporation (AFSC) and projected crop costs,” says Rawlin Thangaraj, crops economist, AF. “Producers can calculate expected margins and the likelihood of achieving those results for various crop plans.”

 

Thangaraj says that CropChoice$ can be used to evaluate a crop plan in its entirety. “Let’s say a producer has a crop plan for 10 fields that he wishes to evaluate. Straight budgets usually only provide gross margins or contribution margin comparison across these crops but CropChoice$ gives you expected gross margins for the entire crop plan or for the scenario of 10 fields. The producer can then compare this result with another crop plan.”

 

CropChoice$ be also used by producers to decide which crops to grow.

 

“Producers usually have a skeletal idea of their crop plan based on past experience, new crop bids and other factors,” says Thangaraj. “I would encourage the producer to enter that as your primary scenario in the CropChoice$ tool and keep this as your baseline scenario.”

 

Producers can then copy that baseline scenario to a second scenario and revise that to reflect an alternate crop plan that the producer wishes to consider. “They can do that by changing the mix of crops, such as commercial crop plan or just a dryland crop plan or irrigated crops scenario. They can do other scenarios such as compare different insurance scenarios such as no insurance, 60 per cent coverage or 70 per cent coverage.”

 

Producers can then run the simulation to compare gross margins, probability of achieving those gross margins and risks associated with these scenarios. They then can choose a crop plan that works for their operation and their risk profile.

 

“CropChoice$ not only helps the producers compare gross margins for the different crops like the simple crop budgets does, but also goes a step further and compares the gross margins for a set crop plan against another crop plan. It then goes even further by giving an added measure of risk to these results.”

 

Crop Choice$ is available free-of charge from AF’s website. “It’s a very easy program to set up and use, and the user guide is an excellent resource to take you through the program,” adds Thangaraj. “Once it’s downloaded, just double click on the icon and choose ‘start’ from the welcome screen and you’re ready to create and compare crop plans.”