Center pivots are an efficient way to water larger fields. Many changes have occurred since the original water drive units. It appears that changes will continue to come even faster. With competition between multiple manufacturers and the growing demand for food, new ideas are being developed and tested at an ever-increasing rate. Sprinkler packages alone have gone from around 60% efficient in the 90’s to nearly 95% efficient today. So, if you haven’t upgraded your sprinkler packages in less that 10 years, that would be a great place to start.

Adding some diversity to your operation can benefit your business in several ways. Combining livestock and crops can help to improve your soil and decrease purchased inputs. Multiple crop species rotated can lower harmful insect populations, reduce weed pressure, and minimize specific nutrient deficiencies. Having income from a variety of sources can prevent large losses if a particular type of product has a challenging year either on the production side or the marketing side.

During my nearly 30 years as an agricultural lender, I noticed that in many cases the difference between an average management team and a highly profitable team was the ability to notice and fine tune the details. Even those operations that had a distinct initial financial advantage due to the previous generation’s successful management skills, struggled over time if they did not pay attention to the little things. It seems quite natural to pay attention to major decisions because of the obvious significant impact. If we neglect the perceived minor decisions, especially if they are often repeated, over time they will add up to a major loss in income.

From the day you start planning for a crop, you make decisions to increase the opportunity to have a successful crop with a strong probability it will create more revenue than expense… profit!

As a young child I remember the doctor’s kid wearing bell bottom pants to school. The style trend slowly moved towards mainstream and then went away. The other day I saw a gal in the airport wearing bell bottoms so broad a toddler could easily hide in there. I’m not sure there is much usefulness for this style. It has taken about 50 years for bell bottom pants to be “groovy “again. My grandpa used cover crops back in the 1950’s and they began to make a comeback in the early 2000’s, about 60 years to be back in “style”. Grandpa may not have known all the benefits, but he had a few good reasons to keep his soil covered in the harvest to plant window; erosion protection, cattle feed, and green fertilizer. Much research has been done at Michigan State University to help us understand the many ways cover crops can benefit our farms today…

Many dairy farms in Michigan have grown substantially over the past few decades in order to gain the economic benefits of scale. Regulations have followed, along with the acronym CAFO, concentrated animal feeding operation. One of those regulations is a required reservoir to capture runoff from outdoor surfaces that could carry nutrients from manure into ditches and streams, as well as effluent from fermenting silage piles. The result is a significant amount of “dirty” water that needs to be field applied…