A practical crop budget can serve as a valuable farming playbook, offering essential direction and guidance from planting through harvest, according to farmers and business partners David Hula and Randy Dowdy.
“Return on Investment (ROI) is the primary focus for the year ahead,” says Dowdy, who farms near Valdosta, Ga. “Everybody is trying to figure out how to survive this lean time, because we don’t have $8 corn or $15 beans.”
Start The Season Strong
For Hula, the strategy for achieving both high yields and ROI begins with selecting the right hybrids and using excellent planting practices, followed by consistent nutrition.
“You want to feel optimistic that you’re going to have high yield potential starting out,” he says. “Then, you need to make sure the crop has all the groceries it needs, because if it runs out of juice at any one time, you’ve just hit the minus button.”
Power Of Finishing The Crop
Hula highlights that another critical component of maximizing ROI, even in current tight markets, is finishing the crop well.
He shares that despite having a challenging growing season this year, his dryland acres achieved their third-best farmgate average. He attributes that to ensuring the crop received the necessary resources late in the season, especially a fungicide application.
“We felt pretty confident [the crop] was going to deliver... and that was mostly because we finished it well. We were picking 66.7 to 67 pounds test weight corn at harvest,” reports Hula, who is based near Charles City, Va.
“Finishing the crop is by far where a lot of people leave a lot of yield on the table,” adds Dowdy.
Use ‘Bushels’ To Track Costs
The current market outlook for 2026 necessitates a sharp focus on expense management, Dowdy notes.
“Obviously servicing debt is still on everybody’s mind. A farmer should never cut out anything that he or she knows makes money. But the problem is sometimes they don’t always know what that is,” he says.
When planning the budget, Hula urges growers to shift their perspective away from the cost of the input and toward the bushel return needed to justify it.
He offers, as an example: “For me to do in-furrow, that requires seven bushels. If I’m not going to get a seven-bushel return per acre, I’m not going to do it.”
Hula believes the bushel ROI mindset should be applied to all inputs. By framing decisions in terms of bushels rather than dollars, he says growers can more easily see the economic impact of each investment they make.
Make Every Input Pay Its Way
Hula and Dowdy are spending significant time this winter consulting with growers on budget strategies through their business, Total Acre. In many cases, they are stressing the importance of refining in-season input applications to make them more efficient, rather than cutting them completely.
“We can keep some of the in-season applications and make them more efficient by placement,” Dowdy says. “The goal is not merely to cut costs, but to find better, more efficient ways to invest money that directly leads to a higher ROI.”
Dowdy and Hula discuss their budgeting recommendations in more detail in their latest Breaking Barriers With R&D podcast discussion on Farm Journal TV and YouTube via the link here:
You can also hear Hula and Dowdy’s latest discussion on AgriTalk here:
