The Nebraska Crop Budgets have been updated for 2018 costs and conditions and include five new budgets relative to corn-soybean rotations. In total there are 78 crop production budgets for 15 crops as well as information on crop budgeting procedures, machinery operation and ownership costs, material and service prices, and a crop budget production cost summary. 

Crop production budgets are grouped by crop and provided in two formats: PDF and an editable Excel that allows you to customize the budget to reflect your operation.

These budgets usually reflect the low one-third in cost per unit of production. For most producers this is a good basis to use for comparison and identify areas where they might be able to lower costs.

For example if your machinery costs are a lot higher than we have in the budgets, you may want to examine ways to reduce the expense by doing custom work or selling some machinery and hiring custom work for that operation.

These budget projections were created using assumptions thought to be valid for many producers in Nebraska; however, each farming operation is unique. These budgets are being released in both Adobe PDF and Excel worksheet formats. The worksheet format allows producers to modify them to match their specific situation. A video by now-retired Nebraska Extension Enterprise Budget Analyst Roger Wilson on the budget website walks viewers through out to best customize a budget for their operation.

In addition to the advantages of having customizable budgets, there is also a caveat: The danger of releasing a tool that can subsequently be modified is that there is no way to verify whether alterations were made or unrealistic data was entered. Users of this tool are responsible for independently verifying all results prior to relying on them.