Farm Horizons
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If you are not a timely operator on a couple of hundred
acres, how can you expect to be timely on 500 acres?
Milking 60 cows and getting 50 pounds per day of milk
is not going to give you a production per cow increase
by milking 90. You need to be on top of the production
issues before you increase the size of the operation.
How can we become better? How do we farm the
best? You need to start by making informed decisions.
A good way to make informed decisions is to commit
time, energy, and money to attend seminars, meetings,
and classes, so that you have more information. Another
is to seek advice and input from other sources.
Being a lifelong learner comes in handy as a farm
business owner, because of all the things that we should
know. Think for a minute, how many occupations that
you cover as a farm business owner – accountant, marketing, veterinarian, herdsman, agronomist, machine
operator, mechanic, truck driver, regulation and verification, human resources, soil scientist, nutritionist, tech
support, and many others.
Are you as knowledgeable and up-to-date as the people who have one of those single occupations as their
profession?
Another way is to have accurate data or records. Yield
records, production costs, budgets, enterprise analysis,
soil tests, feed tests and rations, and maintenance records are all examples.
Let me give you an example; if you had attended some
seminars and classes, you would have an understanding
of a soil test and how it relates to a fertilizer recommendation. You would know the difference between a
soil-build recommendation, a crop-yield recommendation, and a crop-removal recommendation. All should
give you a respectable yield, providing all of the other
pieces of the puzzle are in place.
Your decision should be based on the economics of
the crop. Can you afford to do a build program in a year
with a high price of $3.50 for a bushel of corn? Would
one of the other recommendations fit the budget better?
Which of the three would have less potential impact on
the environment? What could you do to make more efficient use of fertilizer dollars?
You, as the business owner, are responsible for your
farming operation. Yes, Mother Nature throws us some
curve balls once in a while and makes things difficult,
but if you have some knowledge or experience or both (
yes experience counts as knowledge), you can decide on
an alternative course of action.
Use your suppliers, friends, extension, and FBM instructor for information and recommendations, but you
have the ultimate decision. You have to sort through
those recommendations and advice and decide if it fits
your farming operation, and if it fits your budget.
Whenever I look at budgets or I look at the Finpack
database, and no matter how many times I hear that we
need to control costs and be more efficient, profitability
always comes back to production. The farms in the top
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20 percent always have more bushels, more pounds of
milk, more pigs per litter, etc.
You achieve production by being a student of that
enterprise. You are among the cows, pigs, corn plants,
soybean plants daily, observing how they are growing,
watching for any signs of stress, whether it be disease,
weed pressure, water stress, or anything else. This allows you to be timely with your response to the stress
that is affecting production. Anything that does not
promote production is a stress. You, as a farm business
owner, are in charge of controlling stress.
I could take a field, split it in half, use the same seed,
fertilizer, chemical inputs, and machinery, and have two
very different yields, just because of timeliness.
I think that we all know that there is a yield penalty
for planting late, that there is a yield penalty for spraying
late. By applying the fertilizer differently we can take
advantage of some efficiencies of placement and timing
that will move us to higher yields. Better soil tilth and
preventing compaction will also help. Getting the combine set correctly is also a big part of the process, are
you controlling the harvest loss?
These are some examples of getting better before getting bigger. These are some ways that you can farm the
best and leave the rest. Be profitable. n
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TRUCK • FARM • AUTO
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Hwy. 12 • Cokato
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