In the complex world of production agriculture, determining which crops will make you the most profit can be a daunting task. To help with decision making, several tools are available for downloading from the OMAFRA web site.

One of these tools is the crop budgeting tool.

The crop budgeting tool provides an easy way to enter your costs, yield, and return expectations. From this you can see whether one type of crop will provide value over another. Each producer will have individual costs for items such as seed, fertilizer, and custom work. By entering these costs, one can see the overall cost per acre to grow the crop. The tool also allows for an optimistic, expected, and pessimistic yield, showing the upper end of returns versus what happens if disaster occurs.

This data can be entered on a per acre basis, or on a total acre per field or farm basis.

The tool includes the ability to select the amount of crop insurance coverage a producer would like.

Figure 1 shows the input for the various yield expectations.

The tool also provides a unique “chance of breaking even” based on the data input. Figure 2.

Some field crops that have budget tools available are: corn, soybeans, canola, barley, oats and wheat.

There is also horticulture crop, fruit tree and livestock budgets available.

Knowing which crops have the potential to provide profit can assist producers with planning and meeting with suppliers and financial institutions. Knowledge is power, and these are powerful tools to provide that knowledge.

To access these tools, please go to:

http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/busdev/bear2000/Budgets/budgettools.htm