Producers asked the question which Precision Agriculture Technologies can be economical in my farming operation?  The use of easily modified crop budgets can help the producer evaluate the technologies and how they affect the profitability of one’s agricultural enterprise.  

The Excel workbook used to create the Nebraska Crop Budgets is available via the internet for those wanting to modify the assumptions used to create them. Each of 50 different crop/system combinations is included as a separate worksheet. The inputs used to calculate the production costs are in four separate worksheets called Materials, Operations, Power Units, and General Variables.

The Materials worksheet is a list of seeds, chemicals, and services with their estimated prices. The changes made to any item in this list will be reflected in the Materials & Services section in every budget where it is used.

Each budget has a section called Field Operations where labor, fuel, repairs, and other ownership costs are estimated. These estimates are calculated using assumptions about individual field machines that are entered into the Operations worksheet. Assumptions include a machine’s cost, age, annual use, hourly fuel use, and acres covered per hour. Calculations of a machine’s depreciation and repair are accomplished using procedures from the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) handbook.

Each field operation is associated with a power unit. Power units include tractors, self propelled machines, and stationary power units. Data used to calculate the costs for these units are found in the Power Units worksheet. It is similar to the Operations worksheet in that unit prices, ages, and past and estimated future uses are used to obtain depreciation and repair costs using ASABE formulas.

Other information used to calculate crop budgets are entered in the General Variables worksheet. These include wage rates, fuel prices, interest rates, overhead costs, and real estate values and taxes.

Budgets may be modified by changing any of the above assumptions or adding or deleting which operations and materials are used by an individual crop budget.