The high cost to produce US crops remains a topic of concern and key farm policy factor in 2025. This article examines the change in cost by input category since…| farmdoc daily
Farmers that own a significant portion of their farmland base typically are in much stronger financial positions today than those who rent a higher percentage of their farmland. Overall, farmers that bought farmland twenty years ago had to meet larger cash requirements to finance the purchase compared with cash renting but have experienced large capital gains and would now seeing significantly higher returns compared to cash rent farmland.| farmdoc daily
Carl Zulauf, Jonathan Coppess, Nick Paulson, and Gary Schnitkey - This article compares economic loss with safety net payments for the nine large acreage crops that USDA, ERS reports a cost of production. 2024 crop safety net assistance is estimated to reduce the nine crop’s collective economic loss from 17% to slightly more than 3% of total economic cost. Coverage of individual crop economic loss varies widely, ranging from 180% (payments exceed economic loss by 80 percentage points) to 45...| farmdoc daily
Nick Paulson, Gary Schnitkey, and Carl Zulauf - Today’s farmdoc daily article provides a revision to the rent factors used in a simple variable cash lease design. The revisions result in slightly smaller rent factors to be applied to measures of corn and soybean revenue to determine variable cash rents. While the decline in crop revenues from highs in 2022 results in larger reductions in variable cash rents than those observed in average cash rents, farmer returns and return projections rem...| farmdoc daily
Dale Lattz, Gary Schnitkey, Nick Paulson, and Carl Zulauf - Machinery cost estimates for 2025 have been released and are available in the Management section on the farmdoc website. Machinery costs are updated every two years, with the last update occurring in 2023. As is usual, estimated machinery costs have increased, with most increases in the 1% to 14% range. The increases from 2023 to 2025 are less than the increases estimated between 2021 and 2023, when many costs increased by as much as...| farmdoc daily
