Use Our SMART Program to Visualize Your Field's Profitability Across Every Acre

As I write this article, it is interesting to look back over the past couple of years. We had two delayed seasons, mainly due to excessive moisture, followed by a more typical season. I’m hoping we can see higher test weights on corn this fall than we have the past two seasons.

In our agronomy division, we have a program that allows our producers to access all of their field data from the comfort of their own home. This program is called SMART. It stands for Soil Management and Rate Technology.

Our SMART program has five key benefits for the customer who sign up for it:

  • 24/7 online access to agronomic information,
  • Mobile access through the explorer app,
  • Variable rate seed,
  • Lime and fertility recommendations, and
    On-site technical training and access to our AgSolver profitability tool.

For the producer that wants to make management decisions from the data collected on their farms, our SMART program is the best way to accomplish that goal.

We use the AgSolver program with our growers to look at how a field’s profitability and ROI can change as you go from one end to the other. It allows our agronomy team to look at how ROI can change across the landscape. These changes can be caused by many factors such as soil type, drainage, pH, fertility, slope, elevation, aspect, soil bulk density, and soil health.

We are used to looking at yield and fertility maps. Now the challenge is to look at how a field produces, what its true profitability and ROI are for each acre, and how can we use this knowledge to better manage our bottom line. There are many types of reports we can generate within the AgSolver platform. The best part is they can be 100% customized with your own information.

If an area of a field is below break-even, we need to decide if we can raise production or lower expenses.  On our field report card, there is a category titled “Acreage Opportunity Ratio”. This refers to the percentage of acres in the field that are currently below break-even. The next item listed on our report card is the “Working Capital Opportunity”. This number is reported in dollars and shows the potential dollar savings if the acreage opportunity ration is moved down to zero.  In most fields we can never get this number to zero, but could we lower it?  Possibly cut it down by half?

In the example, the acreage opportunity rate is at 35%, with a working capital opportunity at $13,700.45. If we can get the working capital percentage down to 17.5%, then the producer could free up $6,850.23 to use elsewhere on their operation.

Another line item to focus on with this report is the “Production Efficiency”. In our generic example, this number is 312 bu/ $1,000. That is for every $1,000.00 spent we produce 312 bushels of corn. The producer can compare this number between fields, farms or rented properties to better evaluate goals and ROI.
On our “Cash Rent” report, there are a couple of very key parameters to focus on: the break-even commodity price, the break-even yield and ROI. There is an estimated profit per acre listed as well for each of these scenarios. At the bottom of the Cash Rent report is a break-even cash rent spreadsheet. This spreadsheet helps the grower to better understand what level of rent is appropriate for the current commodity price and average yield for each scenario.

Please visit with your local United Cooperative agronomist today so you can start using this tool to better understand and evaluate your field’s profitability and ROI. It is informative when you compare three different scenarios and only change one variable; such as changing the commodity price by $0.30 on each scenario and then see how the numbers change. This could be useful when setting up targets with your grain merchandiser.

Want to learn more? View our SMART Soil Sampling video. 

Have a safe and productive harvest season.

-Rob Shields, Precision Management Department Supervisor/Agronomy Recruiter

 

Posted on Sep 28 at 16:00