Field Notes
Washington, weather, and basis: the trinity of farm decisions
Your Breakeven Number Is Lying to You
Breakeven sounds solid. Feels like a number you work out once a year, drop into a spreadsheet, and run with. Add up rent. Seed. Fertility. Fuel. Machinery. Interest. Divide by what you expect to yield. There’s your number. Except that number won’t stay put. Breakeven moves. Sometimes slow enough you don’t notice. Sometimes fast enough…
When Big Crops Don’t Mean Big Checks
Strong yields still matter. They feel like you did something right. Good weather. Good management. Good timing. Combines stay full. The yield monitor looks solid. The year feels like it worked. But yield alone doesn’t decide how things end anymore. Plenty of seasons, the best production years don’t turn into the best financial ones. Yield’s…
The Shrinking Window
Farming’s always been about timing. Down here in the Mid-South, timing never cut much slack. Spring can flood heavy ground overnight. Summer heat builds fast. Fall storms don’t wait for you to finish cutting. Work happens in windows. Always has. What changed isn’t the calendar. It’s how much rides on every workable day. Equipment Got…
When Spring Rains Stop Coming in May
Spring rain is supposed to taper off. April is messy. May is when things settle. Fields dry, planters roll, and whatever margin exists for the year starts to take shape. That rhythm used to be reliable enough to plan around. Lately, it hasn’t been. More springs are breaking in the same way: rain through April,…
Cost Creep Is More Dangerous Than Price Volatility
Farmers spend a lot of time watching prices. Futures charts. Basis levels. Market headlines. A ten- or twenty-cent move can feel urgent because it shows up immediately and it’s easy to see. Price volatility gets attention because it’s loud. Cost creep doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t spike. It doesn’t crash.…
Why Basis Doesn’t Move Like It Used To
It used to be that things felt pretty predictable. Harvest time would bring its challenges, while spring was all about renewal and strength. Export windows would tighten things up, and farmers who were paying attention could time their sales just right, snagging an extra ten or twenty cents a bushel without even needing to touch…
Prevented Planting Keeps You Whole Until It Doesn’t
You don’t forget the year the planter never left the shed. The forecast kept promising a break that never came—one more inch of rain, one more cold front, one more week of watching ground that should have been turning black stay the color of coffee and standing water. Prevented planting is supposed to be the…