Grain farmer. It is not one consecutive month, for what it is worth. The work is spread out over the year, but the total time spent each year is equivalent to about a month of work.
Is this an unusual year? It seems the small grain farmers I know make just ok money in the past. Certainly not enough to pay for benefits and stuff. Or maybe your small farm is much larger than the small farms I know (~100ac).
This year is indeed unusual. If Mother Nature plays nice the farm might pay more than my tech job, but don't count your grain before its in the bin. A lot can go wrong quickly.
Ultimately, profitability is entirely dependent on your debt load. You need to be a huge farmer if most of your profits are going to pay the bank, which is how a lot of farmers want to do it. I've been able to leverage my tech job income to keep my debts to a minimum, so I can make a lot more per acre. The downside is that, by not taking on many acres, my wealth will be much less in the end than another farmer in my cohort who is buying up everything while taking little to no income.
It's a tradeoff. You have to decide what's more important: Wealth or income.
> Or maybe your small farm is much larger than the small farms I know (~100ac).
I think we have a similar definition. I'm at ~120 acres.
Was the tech job money a one-time purchase of capital assets for the farm? Or, if you're injecting tech job income on a regular basis, are you considering those as costs when you're calculating how much money the farm is making?
Both. It allowed me to get the business off the ground through capital asset purchases and it provides an operating loan, so to speak, to afford inputs. The figures I speak of are net income, so the "operating loan" is paid back before reaching those figures. As farming is, by definition, an investment, not a job, it is implied that the income is the ROI on the capital investment.
At today's prices? Soft white, which is what I normally grow, is currently selling for around $15 per bushel. I typically expect around 100 bushels per acre. So $180,000 if you had 120 acres of it. But in a normal year, yeah, that's not too far off. Corn and soys are where you make the money. Wheat is normally grown around here just to keep the soil healthy.
