It’s no secret that farmers and growers are facing a significant impact on farm profitability with a down market headed into harvest. But, with the right mindset, you can manage your balance sheet accordingly while still maximizing crop production. Reduce expenses where necessary, but balance what you can do economically and what the plant needs to thrive. Diminished commodity prices don’t need to diminish your crop productivity.
Don’t Sacrifice Bonus Bushels
Maximizing yield will still help you realize the best economic outcome possible. There’s a balancing point where you’re doing too much, but it’s a matter of looking at how you’ve done things and being as efficient as possible.
“If you’ve built a system in higher commodity prices that has allowed you to raise more consistent higher yields, then it’s going to take those same things at a lower commodity price to raise those higher yields,” says Mike Zwingman, Verdesian Life Science Director of Agronomy, Row Crops. “The last place you want to be in is taking the lower commodity price and then making decisions that lose 10 to 15 bushel off the top.”
You Can’t Save Your Way to Prosperity
In a down market, continue to do what you’ve been doing but get it to the razor’s edge. Products you might consider to be “add-ons” could be the difference between meeting your yield goals and falling short. The other thing to consider is depressed crop prices won’t stay down forever, and harvest can always bring some surprises.
“We could easily get in the scarcity mindset of we’re going to save our way to prosperity,” Zwingman says. “But the good, trusted advisor who’s been recommending the right things for the last four or five years is still recommending things that will make you money today. Now, those decisions might not make you a four-to-one ROI right now, but they might make you at a two-to-one ROI, which is better than nothing.”
Evaluating Inputs Strategically
There are many ways to tackle maximizing yield while reducing expenses, but it might take a more creative approach.
Here are three tips on how to approach it in your operation:
- Go from a build recommendation of nutrients to a maintenance approach and continue or start using a nutrient-use efficiency product like Phree-uP®. This will help protect the phosphorus applied and mineralize some of the phosphorus built up over time to make the plant and your phosphorus investment more efficient.
- Make decisions that maximize your stand early on. One of the biggest components to yield, especially in corn, is ears per acre. Products such as SEED+GRAPHITE® will help mitigate early stress and get crops out of the ground faster, with better vigor and more consistent stands.
- Protect your fertilizer investment – no matter the market. Using products such as Trident™, Alterra G™ or Alterra L™ is important to protect Nitrogen investments everyday, but it’s even more important when you’re trying to run on the razor’s edge of Nitrogen efficiency.
“As a child of 80s production agriculture, one thing that seems to be the constant is when things got tough, the people who persisted through those times are the people who continued to do the things you need to do to raise better crops,” Zwingman says. “They weren’t cutting way back, so I think we must stay in this growth mindset of maximizing bushels, because that’s the other side of the income equation.”
Verdesian Solutions
At Verdesian, we use the latest science to transform agriculture and improve the health of crops. Our products are used in many crops to maximize yield, improve crop quality, increase nutrient availability, and much more. The wide variety of biostimulant solutions match or answer the wide variety of challenges growers face. Contact us today to learn more!
