Improve Your Vegetable Farm’s Profitability by Combining Financial and Production Planning

Dec 04, 2023

By Jonathan LaPorte

Looking to improve profitability and productivity on your vegetable farm? MSU Extension offers a variety of decision tools that help. Many of these tools consider key decisions as you plan for and evaluate your growing season. The newest of these tools provide planning support for large and small vegetable farms.

The Crop Budget Estimator for Vegetables is designed for evaluating many types of management decisions. Two versions of the estimator are available:

The detailed version offers a more in-depth level of analysis. Using your own records and current market data, you can evaluate and more accurately consider a number of management decisions. Decisions that reflect the situation of your individual farm business. With this information, you can build a budget to:

Create break-evens for use in marketing or production decisions.
Evaluate capital purchases (i.e., a new tractor or harvester).
Assess the efficiency of your operation with financial ratios.

If you are familiar with the Fertilizer and Pesticide Cost Comparison Decision Tools, these resources are also built-in. Allowing you to:

Compare chemistry and fertilizer programs recommended by crop nutritionists and advisors.
Calculate the amount of fertilizer you’ll need to reach your yield goals.
- This feature uses soil test data, manure applications, and nutrient product information.

Note: The level of complexity provided may make it more suitable for large farms. Especially those operations that have more variability due to size and scale. If your farm is of smaller scale, a less complex decision tool may better fit your management needs.

The simple version was built with smaller farm needs in mind. Instead of using a built-in, step-by-step process, you can directly enter your own cost estimates. Other cost comparison tools can still be used to help you determine those values, if desired. Or you can use last year’s information if you expect costs to be similar. The simple version then provides an assessment of revenue goals, cost of production, break-evens, and financial ratios.

Mini calculators are also available in the simple version. For example, some small farms may use raised beds, especially if farming only a few acres or on less than an acre. The simple version offers a built-in calculator to estimate your actual production area when using raised beds. A simplified fertilizer calculator is also available to estimate cost per acre on select products.

As Michigan farms face challenging weather, uncertain markets, and tightening margins, making well-informed decisions has never been more important. Using decision tools can help you improve profitability, be productive, and minimize potential risks to your farm business.

Source : msu.edu

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”