You might recall this viral stunt from when it was announced last spring: John Deere and tech influencer David Cogen (@TheUnlockr) joined forces to set the New York-based journalist up as a row crop farmer for an entire growing season. Using 20 acres of prime Iowa farmland, Cogen’s mission was to find out if he could accomplish what farmers must achieve to put food on America’s dinner tables: turn planted crops into cold, hard cash.
Unlike most farmers, though, Cogen was basically given every cheat code in the game: He had guidance from John Deere experts throughout the crop journey, all of the latest John Deere equipment with all the tech bells-and-whistles any farmer could dream for —not to mention a blank check for seed, crop inputs, fuel and labor.
Cogen began by ordering up soil tests and custom fertilizer applications. Then he flew back to Iowa to complete the spring tillage pass and seed the field. Next came another trip to spray weeds post-emergence with Deere’s See & Spray smart application system before returning in the fall to harvest the finished grain and haul it down to the local ethanol processing plant.
Along the way Cogen learned a handful of lessons any seasoned farmer already knows all too well:
- The weather never seems to do what you want it to do, when you want it to do it. That’s farming.
- You have to eradicate weeds or they will rob your yields and destroy your profits.
- Variation is the enemy, it’s all about consistent production and harvesting at the precise moisture level and timing.
- A dry late-summer and early-fall is a factor you can’t control but it can cost you real dollars on your final yield. The corn will dry down too fast in the field if you don’t get it off on time, so in this case, water is truly money when it comes to corn and soybean farming.
In the end, Cogen’s field averaged 209 bushels per acre and produced just over 3,000 total bushels of corn, which equates to over 200,000 lb.
His total expenses for the year (land costs, seed, fertilizer and “other”) totaled $16,456, while his total revenues for the 19.24 total acres of corn harvested was $16,478.
Don’t adjust your monitor. Yes, you read that right.
The New York tech editor farmed all year long and only brought home $22 in total profit. It just goes to show, turning a profit on only 20 acres is incredibly hard to do. Small acre farmers deserve just as much respect as the big boys.
“Honestly, I hope that like myself, that this has opened your eyes into what it actually takes to farm,” Cogen says at the end of the video. “Just all of the work that goes into it and you can have a new appreciation for farming and for farmers.
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