Explore our blog featuring articles about farming and irrigation tips and tricks!
Explore our blog featuring articles about farming and irrigation tips and tricks!
By John Otte
Making field operations more efficient can help farmers maintain margins as crop prices soften. Understanding how odd-shaped fields impact machine costs per acre can help farmers fine-tune cash rent bids.
Kansas State University’s spreadsheet, KSU-GPS guidance, examines machine operation costs relative to field size and shape. It also evaluates economics of guidance technology in the context of overlap, which impact machine usage, or overlapping of machine operations per land acre; crop input usage, or overlap of inputs applied per land acre, which affects cost of crop inputs and revenue associated with crop input overlap on headlands; and economics of sprayer boom or machine section control technology.
Typical uses would involve crop spraying, planting or tillage. Dollar-valued calculations generally are on a per “applied” acre basis. A 3,000-acre field sprayed three times in a year results in 9,000 applied acres for the year. Per-applied acre values are brought back to an implied investment per applied acre via simple amortization (no salvage value of technology is considered).
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