Will the 2013 Year Be Boom or Bust for SD Agriculture?

Most of you could answer that question with the same response. It will all depend upon the moisture received in the 2013 year. Let us dig a little deeper into the financial analysis that we have ahead of us for the 2013 production agricultural year. The Mitchell Elevator records the weekly in-going price of the grains they purchase for the SDCF/RM Program at Mitchell Tech. We have records of those prices for the last 20 years. They are available to you by going to the website of http://www.mitchelltech.edu/sdcfrm and scrolling down to “FBM Input Prices 1993-2012.” You can use these prices for your balance sheets, average feed price for home grown feeds, and average harvest price for the grains grown in South Dakota. If you look at the average feed price, it is the Wednesday prices at the Mitchell Elevator for every year. If you look down below it is the average feed fed price for every Wednesday for the last 5, 10, and 15 years. The average feed fed prices for the last five years are my base prices for the 2013 harvest time cash price to complete my crop budgets. Those prices are for Corn $5 per bushel, Soybeans $11.46 per bushel, Winter Wheat $6.62 per bushel, Spring Wheat $7.50 per bushel. Who can use these Input price numbers? Any person in agriculture that would like to go back for the last 20 years and research the average price of grains and alfalfa for budgeting purposes.

If you look back at the 2012 crop growing year, in June we were all looking at these prices as the harvest time cash prices until the faucet was shut off and the heat got turned up. Will that happen again? No one knows, but according to the recent land rent prices and increasing land prices, one would think not. What can you do to help increase your bottom line? You can look at enrolling in the South Dakota Center for Farm/Ranch Management Program that is now available to most farms/ranches in South Dakota. We have six instructors who cover 90 percent of South Dakota. The program is administrated at Mitchell Technical Institute, but we have instructors that work in the Aberdeen, Brookings, Huron, Madison, Mitchell, Pierre, Rapid City, Sioux Falls, Watertown, and Yankton areas. Please contact us by going to the website above or call us at 1-800-684-1969.