No-till Notes: 'Dryland budgets, part 2'

Last week I looked at some of the budgets Jessica Johnson, Ag Educator with the UNL Panhandle Resource and Extension Center, put together for winter wheat production on dry land acres for the Panhandle. Jessica’s budgets were for conventional winter wheat/summer fallow, winter wheat/chemical fallow, and winter wheat grown in a continuous no till crop rotation.

These budgets indicate a yield of 28.01 bushels/acre is required to cover all costs associated with winter wheat production grown in a continuous no till crop rotation, 33.07 bushels/acre for winter wheat grown in a conventional tillage summer fallow system, and 35.98 bushels/acre for winter wheat grown in a chemical fallow production system. These yields are using today’s cash price of $7.03/bu. for winter wheat. What these budgets don’t tell you is the potential income you lose during the fallow part of the rotations that use the long fallow period to store moisture.

If a producer uses conventional winter wheat fallow or chemical fallow production system receives good rain during the course of the growing season and harvests a good winter wheat crop it has been a good year. If the producer is using one of the fallow systems where one half the acres are in fallow he has missed an opportunity to produce a crop on those acres. This missed opportunity is not considered a failure since he has produced a good winter wheat crop. This missed opportunity may be more expensive than you realize.

Jessica’s budgets also looked at other crops grown on dry land other than winter wheat including the two crops that are in our rotation, corn and field peas. In our continuous cropping system all our acres are planted each year, so long term fallow costs are eliminated.

Jessica’s budget for dry land corn has a cash cost of $214.12 per acre and a total cost of $267.12 per acre. Using today’s cash price of $7.10/bu. for corn it would require 30.15 bushels/acre to cover the cash costs and 37.62 bushels/acre to cover the total costs. If a producer raises 55 bushels of corn per acre, he would profit $123.40 per acre.

We use field peas to transition from the dry land corn as a short season crop to allow us to plant our winter wheat the following fall in our crop rotation. We plant the field peas in late March the spring following the corn crop and harvest them in July. This gives us a 2 month fallow period prior to seeding winter wheat.

Jessica’s budgets for field peas show cash costs of $125.64 per acre and a total cost per acre of $178.64. Today’s market price for field peas is $9.00 per bushel so a yield of 13.96 bushels per acre is required to cover the cash costs of producing field peas. A yield of 19.84 bushels is required to cover the total costs per acre. If a producer has an average yield of 28 bushels per acre, he can expect a profit of $73.44 per acre for producing the field peas.

On our farm we then plant the winter wheat crop following the field peas in the fall and start the rotation over again. Provided we have normal rainfall and produce average crops during this rotation, the profitability of a continuous no till crop production system is significantly greater than the traditional winter wheat summer fallow system.

It seems most often the yield differences in varying winter wheat production systems are often discussed when choosing a crop production system that is best suited for our region. Winter wheat has been the backbone of our dry land crop production for years in this area so it is understandable that we rate winter wheat yield comparisons pretty high when choosing a cropping system to use on our farm.

I would encourage producers to look closely at the profitability of the entire system when looking to switch to no till crop production systems. In our no till continuous cropping system we do have failures when we run into prolonged drought periods like we are experiencing currently. These failures are offset by the production profits we experience in the years where we have normal or above normal precipitation during the growing season.