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Thursday, September 3, 2026
Farm Press ThemeAgribusiness · Business & Production
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Farm Press ThemeAgribusiness · Business & Production
Home / Strategy

Strategy

Strategy covers commitments made a season or more in advance: crop rotation and acreage allocation, forward contracts and storage, hedging decisions, land rental and purchase, and diversification into new enterprises. Each analysis works through the assumptions on cost and price that the decision depends on, and what happens when those assumptions fail.

Rotation planning, contracting, storage and price protection: the choices a farm business commits to long before the crop is in the ground.

Strategy

Input buying without the price guessing

Seed and fertilizer are the largest direct costs in university row-crop budgets — the buying strategy that manages them is about structure and timing discipline, not forecasting.

Isabel Duarte
Close-up of layered dry fertilizer blend in gloved hand
Strategy

The storage math behind holding grain

Commercial storage in Iowa runs 9 to 16 cents a bushel for the first three months and 2 to 4 cents a month after that — the numbers a store-or-sell decision has to beat.

Tanya Brooks
Clean editorial infographic chart of monthly grain storage costs
Strategy

Enterprise budgets that find the leaks

A crop-by-crop budget, built from university cost estimates and your own records, shows where a row-crop operation actually makes and loses money.

Tanya Brooks
Farm operator reviewing crop cost worksheets at a kitchen table