Strategy
Diversify or specialize: run the numbers
The 2022 Census of Agriculture records farms earning income from multiple enterprises — but scale and management capacity decide which strategy fits a given operation.
Tanya Brooks · March 13, 2026
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.
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 · February 18, 2026
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 · January 26, 2026
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 · January 4, 2026