01.25.08 - What Crop To Plant Next Year...
Make A Hard Decision Easy!
By Wayne Dulaney, Lead Agronomist AgVenture Seed
Want to make all of the right decisions next season in your farming operation? Do you want to do everything as close to perfect as possible so you make more money than every before? Do you want to plant the right crops so you can hit the market highs in those crops?
Do those questions sound like a pipe dream? They shouldn’t. Many growers are already successful. How? They are in control of their future. They stopped guessing at which crops to plant and started basing those decisions on what they know. Here is how it works.
For most of you, this is not your first rodeo. This isn’t the first time you’ve scratched your head, trying to decide what crops to plant next year. Information from coffee shop conversations, the media, volatile markets, and other sources can easily confuse any grower who is trying to make those decisions. Unfortunately, too many farmers actually consider bad information when developing their crop plans and usually end up regretting it. After all, using bad information, not based on your specific needs, can lead to bad results. You need to have a customized plan that fits YOUR farm and YOUR needs, not someone else's.
Growers in the 21st century can no longer base planting intentions on what they don’t know. Instead. they need to use what they DO know, which will generate a lot less worry and a lot more profit.
At our farm in Clarksdale we used to struggle with those same decisions, but not anymore. About four years ago we completely changed to a cropping plan system for our decision-making, and results have been much better for us every year since. We stopped basing next year's livelihood on things we didn’t know or could not control, things like what the markets were going to do and how many acres of a particular crop we thought other farmers were going to plant. Instead, we now base our decisions on what we know for sure and can control ourselves.
The cropping plan is the foundation for everything we do on our farm. It tells us what we need to plant on every acre every year. Here is how we do it.
When we sit down with a customer, the first thing we do is start his own personal cropping plan. Most farmers, believe it or not, do not have one. We help him list every field in his operation, look at what makes each field unique, and then decide which crop best fits that uniqueness. Then we carefully choose the right varieties for each crop by field and make sure everything fits into a rotation, if applicable.
Daniel Brooks, Coldwater, MS. "I believe the cropping plan benefited me because I am matching exactly what variety I need with different soil types," says Daniel Brooks of Coldwater, MS. "Where I farm, I may have sandy soil here and clay soil there and some of each in the same field. We have gone around and looked and decided what variety we needed to plant where and that has made a tremendous difference."
For example, if a field will go into corn, we will encourage the grower to enter that field into our 300 bushel, five-year Max Profit corn program. That means that particular field will be either corn-on-corn or in rotation with another crop. The goal is to get the corn yield average in that field to 300 bushels per acre or more, while breaking yield barriers in the other crops at the same time. In other cases, a grower may have a field that is conducive to raising top corn yields and the grower wants to rotate back to soybeans. After all, research shows an average yield increase of 10-12 percent in soybean fields that were planted to corn for the previous two years in a row. The characteristics of each field will tell you what to plant. This is so important because we believe we cost ourselves big profits when we base our cropping decisions on market prices or input costs rather than deciding what each field is most capable of producing. What good does it do to produce a crop for the sake of market prices if you lose yield while doing it?
According to Jackson Webb of Sumner, MS, "Dulaney Seed’s cropping plan has been one of the greatest benefits other than their seed quality. When I go to the field to plant, every decision has already been made far in advance. When the seed is delivered, it has the field number and rate indicated on the bag. That takes a lot of guesswork out and it also alleviates a lot of problems.
Every farmer tries to outguess the market and is wrong almost every time. As soybean and fertilizer prices stay high, most growers will want to plant more soybeans. But both of those are poor reasons to plant any crop. Even at $350.00/ton 32% nitrogen solution, what would an extra 25-50 bushels per acre corn at $5 per bushel do to profitability? It would more than pay for the fertilizer, keep your production plan in balance, and lower your risk of missing other markets.
Scott Flowers of Clarksdale states, "It just helps us to go ahead and start thinking early about what we are going to do for next year’s crop, and to the type of crop and the variety on the right piece of ground. And it is good to have them to help us with making those decisions. One good thing about it is just thinking about it early and getting everything laid out early"
So go ahead and let your cropping plan tell you what to plant next year and how much. It will give you a more diverse portfolio and allow you to better market all your crops. Plus, there is one more hidden benefit to crop planning that is often overlooked. It almost always, automatically helps a farmer maintain a balanced crop rotation while maximizing yields and returns. You can"t beat that.
Don’t make next year’s cropping decisions so difficult. Call your AgVenture Crop Planning Specialist today. Our guys are the experts because they do it every day. We guide you through the process, take away the worry, and help you take your profits to a whole new level in 2008.