Martin Family Farms

What is it costing us?

 I thought I would do a little history of expenses the last four years. These are for corn and do not include family living or profit margin. They are figured using an average cash rent price.  They include seed, nitrogen, dry fertilizer, insecticide, insurance, machinery, hired labor, interest, fuel, chemicals and machinery. These are only and estimate of what it might cost  to produce and acre of corn and what it would take per bushel to break even at 175 bushels per acre. As you can see there is a pretty steep increase the past four years. 

 

Year        Expenses /acre       Break Even 175 bushels per acre

 

2005           $ 310               $ 1.77

 

2006            $358               $ 2.05   

 

2007            $412                $2.36   

 

2008            $609                $3.48

 

2009            $721              $ 4.12

Another Land Sale

Another farm sale took place today in the western part of Logan County and eastern Sangamon County.

Tract 1 158 acres consisted of Osco, Elkhart and Radford soils and was a HEL tract brought $4900 per acre.

Tract 2 242 acres 229 tillable with Sawmill, Ipava, and Denny soils brought $4600

Tract 3 91 acres with 65 tillable brought $2001 with mostly Sawmill soils (good buy)

There have still been some reports of some $7000 + sales for prime land. These farms were kind of wet, but still productive so it is hard to tell if the value is coming down.Time will tell as we get into spring.  

Tonight I am heading into a meeting to see if one of our local co-op elevators (Latham) is going to buy the other co-op to the north (Chestnut). I will keep an update posted.  

Farm for Sale

We had a land auction of 80acres today about 10 miles west of Mt.Pulaski. The piece was sold by Mike Maske Auction brought $7650 per acre. It had flat black soils. The top two bidders were farmers. It looks like land prices continue to stay solid even with low commodity prices. Check out previous land sales on our website www.martinfamilyfarms.org

How are we going to handle all of the corn?

I was reading an interesting article in Top Producer that shed some light on the future of corn production. It was talking about the infrastructure changes that will be needed if we increase the bushels per acre of corn we are raising.  If production is to double using 2007 acres that would mean about 12 billion more bushels. Just to get the corn out of the field would require 10million more trips using average sized trucks. It would also take 240,000 more 50,000 bushel bins to store the crop.  That would put a pretty big strain on township and county roads. How will they handle that? Will land values rise enough so that tax money generated can be used to updates roads and bridges? Will farmers have to pay an increased license fee to haul their product?  This is something to think about. In order to feed the View this photo world population by 2025 food production will have to double.

Welcome to our new farm blog

Welcome to all  of you who have been visiting our website for the past year. I am  trying to change things up a little and network with some more people so we are going to post our updates on this blog site. I will try and put a link from the website to the blog for convenience. I am new at this so bear with me.