CHESTERVILLE — By all accounts, the 2022 crop will be the most expensive ever put in the ground. Farmers are hearing that cost of production for some has hit $1,000 per acre.
Derks Elevator co-owner Marty Derks has his own cost of production penciled out to the penny: $928.41 per acre. From tillage and seeding through final harvest, that’s what producing the crop on one 135-acre field is charted to cost his Chesterville operation this year.
Marty Derks.
Derks stays on top of the numbers for each field with a meticulous spreadsheet cost calculation per- formed every year. The most expensive items in that $928.41 is, of course, fertilizer at $408.74, followed by seed at $125 and drying at $103.38. By comparison, in 2019, the final year preceding the pandemic, the per-acre cost of production on the same field was $608.27, according to Derks’s calculations. Fertilizer com- prised $218.28 of that figure, again followed by seed at $130 and drying at $66.68. He planted more seed per acre in 2019, at 44,000 plants, but has dropped the population to 35,000 in 2022.
Surprisingly, Derks figures that even though costs are way up, so are commodity prices and his profit will also be up. The projected per-acre gross margin is $669.33 compared to $262.99 in 2019. All that’s needed now is for the weather to behave and no other adverse events.
