Growing Corn

[sweetmusicj]

Ok, this may be one of the stupidest questions in the history of Homesteading Today...but here it goes.

Assuming you had land paid off, roughly how much profit is currently being made off of one acre of corn? Figure fertile land in SE Minnesota.

I know there are tons of variables, but just humor an ignorant dreamer for a minute if possible.

Basically my dream is to raise some beef cattle and raise some corn on the family farm that is currently being rented out. I grew up a country boy, just not a farming country boy, we were raised in the woods (my grandpa own a sawmill)!

[uncle Will in In.]

iF YOU GET 150 BU PER ACRE, AND SELL IT FOR $5.00 per bushel You'll be on easy street in a whip stich. If you pay $150 cash rent and get $2.50 per bushel for 100 bu per acre you will need a dang good off farm job to keep from going broke.
Normally, you will be out about $150 plus rent cost per acre. If you can forsee the price of corn 6 months ahead of time, you should be on the stock market and leave the sod busting to perpetual opptimists (farmers) Buying the nessesary equipment is a like a jab in the eye with a sharp stick.
I hate to sound negative, but I own 180 acres of good corn ground and can't afford to farm it myself. After the expenses I wouldn't have nearly as much as I recieve for cash rent. My renter bought a new combine this summer. $249,000.

[woodsy]

You could grow around 16,000 ears of sweet corn on an acre, plus or minus a couple thousand depending on conditions that year.
Do the math, going rate at the market is about 4.00 a doz but you will probably need a middle man to help you move that much to market.
I'm guessing you might come out of a season with a couple thousand dollars after all time and expenses are accounted for.
Maybe someone who actually grows sweet corn for the market will chime in.

[Windy in Kansas]

I can't begin to imagine all of the expenses for corn so can't give you any idea. Keep in mind that it is a heavy fertilizer feeder so fertilizer replacement costs will be great.

If you keep the weeds out with chemicals you will have a higher yield from the moisture conservation versus conventional cultivation, but will have the expense for chemicals and application or upkeep in a sprayer. As to how far you go with chemical will also determine whether you will need Roundup Ready seed corn at nearly $200 or more per 80,000 count bag.

I expect you will want to insure the crop because of the high input costs per acre so don't forget to figure that in.

I suppose that corn farmers are still making some money but one does have to wonder what happens if weather causes production to drop more than a little.

[Wisconsin Ann]

One of our local homesteader types who has a farm market on the roadside, raises sweetcorn every year as part of it. She plants 2 acres every year, in 2 week increments. That way she has sweet corn all summer. (the first rows she puts under row covers). She and her partner do it by hand (one of those push seed planters) and a tiller. She plants beans (nitrogen fixers) next to the corn, then squash between the rows. (three sisters planting) The squash seems to shade out weeds, and keeps deer away from all but the outer edges of the field.

It's labor intensive, but she sells all the corn she has available at $3.50 a dozen (no pesticides, organic, all that) Her only overhead is the seeds.

NOW....to do that she had to have a steady customer base. If you have good road traffic, or a good local farmer's market....it can work.

If you're talking field corn....considering the risks in the market with that, I'm not sure I'd even think about it. $8.00 a bushel one year, $3.50 the next. Has been hanging around $4.00 a bushel for years.

[HermitJohn]

Go rent a movie called "King Corn". It follows the season with an acre of modern farmed field corn in Iowa. Quite interesting and very different than way Dad farmed.

Now if you are growing some specialty corn crop on small scale, say organic pink popcorn or something, then thats whole different thing.

[clovis]

I do not farm, but alot is going to depend on your inputs.

The other side of the equation is the cost of equipment. You can farm with a vintage Farmall M or H, but it is going to be slow moving. What does an M pull, a two or three bottom plow? An Allis 190 might be great depending on how much time you have and the number of acres you need. If you have lots and lots of acres, you are probably going to need bigger, better, faster equipment that will allow you to plow, disc and plant in a narrower time frame. Around here, June 15th is the cut off plant time for corn, if I am not mistaken.

How many acres are you wanting to farm?

[wwubben]

The estimate for growing corn in 2010 is $3.33 per bushel.That is figuring $200 an acre land expense------rent or ownership.You can not contract it for that right now so you will be growing corn on faith for next year.This is for established farmers so you may have a larger expense to get started.

[Old Vet]

It depends on how much you farm. You can't take what 1 acre and project it to 1,000. Large farmers are the only one that can afford to farm all the time and break close to even. I used to farm 10,000 acres and just broke near even. If you had 10,000 acres you can make money but not a lot of it. The money goes up with the number of acres. If you farm 150 acres don't quit your day job because you may break even but not get rich. I know several that farm 150 acres and they all had a regular job.

[rambler]

Profit is a difficult thing. How much fertilizer do you need? What kind of machinery, for 10 acres or for 1000 acres? And so on.

You are not talking sweet corn, you are talking field corn.

That part of the state can get 200bu per acre. Best to plan for 175 tho. If you want to do it homesteader way & organic and all, figure 80-100 bu per acre.

We don't know what corn will be worth next week. It's about 3 bucks a bu right now.

So, will you be making $600, $525, or $240 per acre gross.

Then, how do you harvest, dry, and store it? You got machinery, or need to buy? You going to keep ear corn, or combine it & dry it?

To get top yield, you need a very good fertility & herbicide program.

They tell us some corn seed will be over $300 a bag next year, that is close to $100 an acre for seed.

Skimp on cheap seed, cheap fertilizer, and poor machinery, and those top yields are not possible.

So. Tell us how you plan to farm it, what size it is, and we can give you closer numbers on what you will be looking at.

A Walmart store makes very little profit on a whole lot of sales.

A mom & pop furniture store makes a whole lot of profit on very few sales.

Both end up struggling to do better than their compitition.

The land owner should be making $200-250 an acre rent on that ground.

The farmer renting it this year likely will be losing $10-15 an acre, unless he marketed very aggressively back in spring. Fert & other costs were very high; grain prices came down a lot. Perhaps the farmer will store his corn until next April & prices will go up & he will make a lot - but no one knows for sure.

A farmer is in a place where we buy corn seed now in October, plant the crop in April, harvest it in October, and try to sell it the following January through April. That is nearly 18 months to string our assets along, hoping we don't get caught up in wild market swings.

Anyhow, I sidetracked, sorry. You can farm several different ways, depending on the size & chices you make. Without knowing that, it is hard to know what sort of profit to look for.

Owning the land free & clear & renting it out for cash rent as is normal in southern MN is where the real profit is.

--->Paul

[geo in mi]

Google is your best friend. Try University of Minnesota Southwest Research and Outreach Center for specific starter information for your region,(I didn't see comparable data for SE Minn.) not opinions given here. Sounds like you have an interesting research project for this winter. There may be a good, understandable reason why the ground is in cash rent right now, and you may find reasons to keep it that way. You may want to keep in mind that corn and beef production, in today's farming style, may be the most difficult occupation for a beginner without experience, and probably the easiest way to lose your shirt in a season of trying.

Also try Agriculture Online, by Successful Farming magazine. You can plug in your zip code in the 'markets' section to get the daily cash grain price, along with a comparison chart for the three year average. You will get some idea of the elevator location where you will have to take your grain at harvest time, what unloading equipment they will accept, how long you may have to wait, etc, etc. Traditionally, cash grain prices are pretty low at harvest time, so you will be figuring any profit at the lowest level, unless you want to invest in grain drying, handling, and storage.

You may find that you will have to purchase your inputs at a higher price level than a larger operator, and that some of the application will have to be contracted, because you will need a license and specifically approved equipment for chemicals and pesticides.

You will also need to check out if the land currently qualifies for price supports. There are myriads of rules and regs concerning the acreage and length of time it has been in support programs. Takes an expert for that....

You will want to consider Murphy's Weather Law, which states that, if you need rain, it won't..... And Pest Law, which states, if you spray for bugs, you'll get worms......

But I'm straying into the realm of opinion; you will want to do some serious Googling and asking you county agent and talking to other farmers for some good advice.

[Jeff54321]

Originally Posted by HermitJohn

Go rent a movie called "King Corn".

I second the advice of watching this movie. It is a good training manual on how to grow Monsanto corn and get government subsidies. This appears to be the primary route to making money in corn.....assuming of course that you like the idea of Monsanto corn and government subsidies.

[woodsy]

Originally Posted by sweetmusicj

Ok, this may be one of the stupidest questions in the history of Homesteading Today...but here it goes.

Assuming you had land paid off, roughly how much profit is currently being made off of one acre of corn? Figure fertile land in SE Minnesota.

I know there are tons of variables, but just humor an ignorant dreamer for a minute if possible.

Basically my dream is to raise some beef cattle and raise some corn on the family farm that is currently being rented out. I grew up a country boy, just not a farming country boy, we were raised in the woods (my grandpa own a sawmill)!

There is a very good article at this link from the National Sustainable Agricultural Service with a financial statement on growing an acre of sweet corn. Helps you evaluate your potential for profit or not. Their profit estimate was more optimistic than mine.

[oldmanriver]

The last corn I sold was 78 cents a pound . LOL well it was in a way . I feed all my corn back to my cows and I sell my calves off when I need the money . The last ones 3 bull 1 year old sold for 1589.00 dollars . I plant corn from my own seed . My yield is no where near the 150 bu per acre mark bust my cost per acre is real low . So I gess it all depends on how you do it .

[J-jay]

I ask my neighbor , what would he do if he had a million dollars. He said he would farm as long as it lasted. It is a lot of work and very little profit.

[highlands]

I think of it this way:
I can raise corn but I won't make much money selling it.
I can feed the corn to pastured cows and increase their milk output dramatically.
But the milk doesn't sell for much more so I'm still not doing well.
I can feed the milk to pastured pigs producing a complete diet for them and sell their naturally raised pork for an excellent price making a good living.

This works, our pastured pork is value added milk and pasture.
Neither milk nor pasture are worth much.
Vertical integration saves the day.

Unfortunately I am not good at growing corn. But I am very good at growing pumpkins, beets, turnips and such and those also make good pig food. Fortunately I do have a supply of milk. I plan to get better at corn. I plan to have our own cows. Everything in its time...

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in the mountains of Vermont
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/blog/
http://HollyGraphicArt.com/
http://NoNAIS.org

[travlnusa]

You started by saying you wanted to raise beef.

I have no idea how much land you have, or what you have for equipment, but I would suggest you raise hay. Plant a grass/alfalfa mix. Pasture May-Oct while you bale 4 times a year (again based on how much land you have).

Now you can sell "natural" grass fed beef, sell feeder steers once per year, sell bred heifers, or as they mature buy what grain you need and feed that for the last 90 or so days and sell beef that way.

I only have 40 acres. I pasture 10 cow calf pairs on 9 acres. Those 9 acres are broke out into 6 pastures with cheap electric fence seperating them. The rest of the land is hay fields.

I have a 1957 Case tractor. I cut and rake the hay, and hire a guy to make large round bales at $8 each.

If you are looking to feed your cows mostly grain, they will be overconditioned (fat) and you will get less at the sale barn.

[Terri]

A very long time ago, people would raised corn and then turn half-grown pigs into the field. They called it "hogging off" the corn. When the corn was gone the then-fat pigs would be sold.

This feed was usually supplemented with milk and anything else the farmer could come up with: Plain corn is NOT a balanced diet! For one thing it is too low in protien.

I read about this in Feeds and Feeding by Morrison: the book was about 130 years old. Back then they did not have as much mechanization, so instead of bring the feed to the pig they brought the pigs to the feed.

Since then, I have always wondered: would it be possible to plant a field with sweet corn, let it get 2 feet tall, and then graze the cattle on it? That would give a LOT of grazing, and sweet corn stems are as sweet as the corn: cut a stalk and put your tongue on it and you will see! I have seen cattle gobble up sweet corn stalks: I bet they would love it!

Alas, I have no cattle, but I always wanted to try this.

[Mel-]

I remember a story that dan rather had on cbs in the early 80s not long after he became head anchor. it was pretty detailed and compared a typical amish farmer to a typical well *normal* farmer. by farmer they were talking about midwestern soybean/corn farmers.

said the average normal farmer lost about $20k a year whereas the average amish farmer made $25k a year. the difference was in land costs and equipment costs. the amish owned their land, rarely rented and by using horse drawn equipment the money they saved alone in payments was the difference in making money and losing money.

wonder how much of that is still true 25 years later.

[rambler]

Farming (corn & beans) is a profession of ups and downs. The late 1970's and early 1980's were terrible down days for farming. World politics smashed the USA farmer in the gut, in addition to some world ecconomics that, for the most part, were helpful to the average working stiff - terrible for farming folk tho.

So, in the 1980's, Dan was probably right for that year or so.

Amish folk had their 'terrible down' years in the mid 1990's into 2000 or so. They were struggling pretty bad to keep up their livelyhoods about then.

Right now, livestock farmers are having their 'down years'. Grain farming isn't too bad, other than this _terrible_ cool summer & wet fall, crops are in terrible shape, can't get them out of the field, too wet - both the crop, and the ground.

--->Paul