Farm Machinery Costs: Own Lease or Custom Hire

One of the largest annual costs on South Dakota farms and ranches today is that of owning and operating machinery. Total costs associated with farm machinery have increased as farm operators have expanded their operations and substituted machines for labor. This trend does not appear to have run its course because new and larger machines are continuously being developed and adopted. Along with these changes have been corresponding increases in productivity per worker, average farm size, and total machinery investment. In many cases, increased investment in machinery has occurred at the expense of operating capital. Farmers have had to invest heavily in modern machinery without being able to expand production enough to justify the added investment. To add to the problem, rising production costs, variable farm prices, and the increasingly competitive nature of all agricultural production have combined to exert important economic pressures on farmers. These trends are causing farmers to take a closer look at the alternatives to machine ownership in order to release scarce capital for investment in other phases of the farm business where a higher return can be realized

Profitability and Nitrate Leaching Effects of Possible Farming Practice and System Changes Over South Dakota\u27s Big Sioux Aquifer: Case Farm No. 2 Summary

The overall goal of the SARE/Water Quality project was to determine whether economic incentives offered by recent environmental provisions of Federal farm program are sufficient to induce Western Corn Belt/Northern Plains farmers in environmentally sensitive areas to adopt sustainable fa practices and systems. To attain this goal, four case farms were chosen involved in this study based on their size, soil types, cropping systems, topography, and management in the Big Sioux Aquifer study area. Case Farm No. 2 is located in Moody County and followed a corn-soybean oats rotation on the acres focused on in the analysis prior to enrollment the Integrated Crop Management (ICM) program. It is a dry-land operation used conventional tillage prior to enrollment in the ICM program. The total operation consists of 1,858 acres, with 710 acres under the ICM program focused on 299 of those ICM acres in our analyses. Lamo and Clamo soils up the majority of the ICM crop acres. These are medium to fine-textured soils overlying a shallow drinking water aquifer

Profitability and Nitrate Leaching Effects of Possible Farming Practice and System Changes Over South Dakota\u27s Big Sioux Aquifer: Case Farm No. 4 Summary

The overall goal of the SARE/Water Quality project was to determine whether economic incentives offered by recent environmental provisions of the Federal farm program are sufficient to induce Western Corn Belt/Northern Great Plains farmers in environmentally sensitive areas to adopt sustainable farming practices and systems. To attain this goal, four case farms were chosen to be involved in this study based on their size, soil types, cropping systems, topography, and management in the Big Sioux Aquifer study area. Case Farm No. 4 is located in Brookings County and followed a continuous corn rotation prior to enrollment in the Water Quality Incentive Program (WQIP). It is an irrigated operation that uses a center-pivot system. Conventional tillage practices are used. The total operation consists of 838 acres, with 213 acres enrolled in the WQIP program. One hundred and fifty of those acres received irrigation management assistance. In one 73-acre field irrigated by a center-pivot system, 66 acres were assumed to be under the center-pivot system and the other 7 acres were assumed to be in the corners of the field where the center-pivot system could not reach. These 7 acres were designated as the set-aside acres for the baseline before scenario. This 73-acre field was focused on in our analyses. The majority of the soils in this field are a combination of coarse-textured (Fordville), and fine-textured (Marysland) soils. Both of these soils overlay a shallow drinking water aquife

Profitability and Nitrate Leaching Effects of Possible Farming Practice and System Changes Over South Dakota\u27s Big Sioux Aquifer: Case Farm No. 1 Summary

The overall goal of the SARE/Water Quality project was to determine whether economic incentives offered by recent environmental provisions of the Federal farm program are sufficient to induce Western Corn Belt/Northern Great Plains farmers in environmentally sensitive areas to adopt sustainable farming practices and systems. To attain this goal, four case farms were chosen to be involved in this study based on their size, soil types, cropping systems, topography, and management in the Big Sioux Aquifer study area