Crop Enterprise Budgets to Use on Your Farm
By Michael Deliberto, Ph.D.
LSU AgCenter
As the pricing environment changes, it is useful to reevaluate the cost and returns of competing enterprises and reexamine the effect that changes in price and/or yield have on net returns (per-acre).
Below you will find links to a staff report and Microsoft Excel enterprise budgets created to reflect the specific per-acre cost structures of individual farming operations. These spreadsheets apply to corn, cotton, rice, and soybean production systems in Louisiana for the 2020 crop year. For each crop production system, the default values for unit costs were obtained from the PDF copies of each enterprise budget originally published in January of 2020 by the LSU AgCenter’s Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness.
Production systems include RR Corn, BtRR Corn, BG2RRF Cotton, Conventional Rice, Clearfield Rice, Hybrid Rice, and RR Soybeans. Irrigated and non-irrigated production practices are specified for different regions of the state when applicable.
Following each production system-specific enterprise budget, a “Blank” spreadsheet is provided so that producers can manually enter their expected crop price, yield, share rent, chemicals, fertilizers, etc. into the budget template. One of the main features of these tools is that producers can enter any production inputs that are cost shared with the landowner. The intent of these farm management tools is to allow producers to evaluate the potential per-acre returns of competing row crops based on expected revenue data, production costs, and share land rent. The per-acre net returns above variable and net returns above total specified costs are calculated for the producer and the landowner.