# Grain Profitability In 2016?



## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

This Illinois study has some suggestions....and a corn and bean calculator tool link.

Regards, Mike

http://www.agweb.com/article/how-to-make-money-in-2016-naa-sonja-begemann/february2016/


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Wow... cut back costs by $100 bucks an acre?? LOL

Sure... DON'T PLANT! When I was row cropping cotton on our home place, I only spent about $100 bucks an acre in direct inputs (not counting fuel and machinery repair). Course I was farming for my Grandmother who believed in doing most things "the old fashioned way" and she didn't want to spend the kind of money most of our neighbors spent... (at least $150 bucks an acre or more... sometimes a LOT more...)

We FINALLY quit row cropping when the fertilizer, seed, and fuel went through the roof... When I was a little kid still riding standing up on the front seat of Dad's 72 Chevy pickup (car seats?? What's a car seat?? LOL Yet somehow we lived through it!) cotton was 60-70 cents a pound most years and we could all go eat out at Ron's Chicken for $0.35 CENTS a plate for a 2-piece chicken dinner with roll and mashed potatoes and gravy... Dad bought a NEW '77 Ford pickup a few years later, a NICE F-100, for $1,650... Grandpa bought one too to replace his 71 International pickup.

When I was in high school in the mid-80's, I remember buying cotton seed for $15 a bag... by the time I graduated it was like $45 a bag. Fertilizer was $100 bucks a ton, went up to $160 a ton by the time I graduated. I remember ordering farm diesel for $0.60 cents a gallon... Farm leaded gasoline for the old cotton pickers and combine was like $0.70 cents a gallon...

When we quit, the cheapest cotton seed you could get was $110 a bag... and the good stuff with GMO's was about $325 a bag... Fertilizer was $330 a ton, diesel was $1.70 a gallon, and the price of parts and supplies like bolts and stuff were through the roof... yet cotton was STILL only 60-70 cents a pound, IN A GOOD YEAR... one year everything in this region went "high mic" (high-mike) because of weather conditions and cotton was selling for 25 cents a pound, IF you could find a buyer... (one guy flew to Lubbock and sold his entire crop for 40 cents a pound because they're typically LOW-MIC up there...)

The breakeven for cotton had jumped up to 2-2.5 bales per acre... JUST TO BREAK EVEN. Then the friggin boll weevil eradication program came in and demanded ANOTHER $20 bucks an acre UP FRONT on top of it all... an instant 20% cost of production increase across the board... We switched to all sorghum and dumped cotton-- no money in it with a bunch of THIEVES STEALING all the profit right off the top!

When sorghum seed went from $7 a sack when I was in high school to $150 a sack the last year we row cropped, I saw the writing on the wall and we switched to all cattle... used the "Freedom to Farm" program payment money on the cotton and sorghum base to pay for fencing the farm. Never looked back, either... We had quit sorghum production in the late 70's thanks to that IDIOT Carter's grain embargo that broke the back of the grain markets and prices tumbled from $5 a hundred for sorghum to about $3 a hundredweight... When I switched to sorghum from cotton in the late 90's, it was STILL $3.50 a hundredweight... No money in that either...

Yeah, I've sold calves for nearly $2.00 a pound, and I remember us selling calves at one point in a bad year in the 70's for $0.25 cents a pound... but the difference is, with crops, you HAVE to spend "so much" to put in a crop, even "doing it cheap"... With cattle, if prices go to $0.30 cents a pound, they'll get $0.30 cent calves... rangy, pot bellied, sway backed, 30 cent calves... I can cut costs to the bone and STILL make *something*... with crops, not so much!

A couple years after I quit row cropping, my old crop insurance buddy called me and asked me if I was going to plant cotton... he said it was supposed to get up about a dollar a pound... I just laughed and said, "Nah, call me when it hits $2 a pound and I'll think about it..." You could literally hear his jaw hit the floor... LOL

People are just "conditioned" to keep working for nothing, and these [email protected] market thieves and big agri-biz's are MORE than content to keep it that way!

Later! OL J R


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## bbos2 (Mar 20, 2015)

Farmers... The only ones willing to buy everything retail, sell wholesale, and pay freight both ways. -jfk


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