Choosing the Most Profitable Rotation

Broadening your choice of crops could offer financial benefits.

- By Raylene Nickel

When choosing the crops you grow, consider rotational impacts. These could affect yields as well as inputs, helping or hurting your bottom line.

“Farmers tend to do what they’ve done in the past, particularly in the Midwest, causing rotations to become fixed,” said Gary Schnitkey, Extension agricultural economist at the University of Illinois. “But we need to think about rotational impacts of crops. For instance, yields of corn after soybeans will be better than yields of corn after corn. There is also likely to be more disease and more need for [nitrogen] in a corn-corn rotation than in a corn-soybean rotation.”

Corn yields also increase, he said, when a cereal grain, perhaps wheat, is added to a corn-soybean rotation. And adding other alternative crops can lower inputs such as pesticides and fertilizer. “The challenge is finding a crop to add to the rotation that has a high enough value to compete with the value of corn and soybeans,” he said.

Simple as ABC

A tool that may help analyze the financial pros and cons of existing or hypothetical rotations is the Agricultural Budget Calculator (ABC). Developed by the Center for Agricultural Profitability in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s department of agricultural economics, the ABC is a free online program designed to help farmers and ranchers figure cost of production and project economic returns for various enterprises. It can analyze profitability of individual crops on dryland and irrigated acres.

“You can do an analysis of your base crops of corn and soybeans, for instance, and then use a crop comparison break-even analysis built into the program that lets you compare alternative crops with the base crops,” said Glennis McClure, Extension educator and farm and ranch management analyst at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. McClure helped develop the ABC.