crops on 10 acres

M

mth74

Well-known member
Looking at a farm house on 12.5 acres.I was just wondering if I planted 10 acres of field corn what would I get in money at end of year.Now I know you can have good years and bad I just want a average.And your not taking into account gas,equipment, maitnence.Just looking to have some fun,get out of the city and make a few bucks at it.




thanks
 
Field corn. Not any where enough to pay the expenses considering the equipment required. You might consider cash renting the 10 acres.

Sweet corn. Might do quite well. Last year, early season sweet corn was selling at over $4.00 a dozen. Sweet corn you could do with a tractor, plow, disk, harrow, cultivator, planter and a lot of manual labor. Throw in a small trailer. My opinion, if you have a full time job - the IH/Farmall Cub and related equipment will be to small.
 
10 acres of any normal farm crop would be hard to make a profit on if you are trying to maintain equipment to handle the crop. A truck patch type garden or produce garden of that size could be quite profitable but very labor intensive even with equipment. Sweet corn, potatoes, green beans, etc. all require a lot of hands-on labor to produce.
I'd consider putting it into hay and selling the standing crop to someone who has the equipment to bale it. Or we used to do a lot of "farming on the halves" where one party provided the land, the other party provided the equipment and labor. Both shared expenses of putting the crop in and shared equally in the profits of the crop produced. It would be difficult to find someone to do that nowadays especially on only 10 acres. But someone may be interested in renting the ground for a crop.
 
JBall8019":16796wor said:
are you going for a real estate exemption?
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John!

Good to see you posting again!! It has been a while since we have chatted. You are one of the ones (along with Don McCombs and Peter Person) who are COMPLETELY responsible for my Cub addiction... Thank you!!!!

Mike in La Crosse, WI
 
WisconsinCubMan":2xfmjgzh said:
JBall8019":2xfmjgzh said:
are you going for a real estate exemption?
Click to expand...

John!

Good to see you posting again!! It has been a while since we have chatted. You are one of the ones (along with Don McCombs and Peter Person) who are COMPLETELY responsible for my Cub addiction... Thank you!!!!

Mike in La Crosse, WI
Click to expand...

Wow, didn't realize that a little snow plowing would be responsible for that! :shock:
And I let ConnectiKit plow some furrows at Cecil's and his wife Ruth drove the Cub for a while as well. What havoc have I sown?
Peter
 
HAHAHA!!!!

I tried looking back through the archives to find out when I made that trip that took me to John's house in Ohio and Don McCombs' house in Maryland... that was all the same trip...but I haven't had any luck yet with that.

Rest assured, Peter, that it wasn't you personally or John or Don McCombs that fueled the fire, but rather the TRACTORS that did it!!

Mike in La Crosse, WI
 
One acre is plenty enough for a truck garden. I would go for the sweet corn and any kind of greens early. You should have a variety of things for the Farmers Market from June through October. The rest put in hay. Let somebody else cut and bail. Hay around here should bring $60 a bail this winter.
 
Hay is a good choice as stated. I get 75cents a pound for yellow squash and did alright. But it is organic and gets sold as organic in Boston. I drop it off down the street and it gets shipped by someone. I also did really well one year growing pumpkins and made $6000 on a 3/4 acre plot! There were 100 pound pumpkins everywhere!!!!! Another choice would be shrubs or hedge types of plants. Arbor vitea trees grow really fat and in 3 years you have a marketable product.
 
What is on the other side of the property line fence? If it's farm land you could cash rent everything but the buildings lawn area.

Another thought. Check with your local county extension office and state conservation office. In Missouri there is sometimes money and machinery assistance for converting farm land back to a more natural area (wild life habitat, tree planting, conservation, etc.).
 
I've got a friend who is growing Aronia Berries on about 10 acres. The crop is very valuable but takes about three years to get to production. The berries retail at nearly $10.00 a lb. The bushes are planted about 8 feet apart and are hardy, disease and pest resistant. The only maintenance is mowing between them. Each bush when mature produces around 25 lbs.

http://hubpages.com/hub/aronia
 
Chuckwheat Farm":10o08yj3 said:
Hay is a good choice as stated. I get 75cents a pound for yellow squash and did alright. But it is organic and gets sold as organic in Boston. I drop it off down the street and it gets shipped by someone. I also did really well one year growing pumpkins and made $6000 on a 3/4 acre plot! There were 100 pound pumpkins everywhere!!!!! Another choice would be shrubs or hedge types of plants. Arbor vitea trees grow really fat and in 3 years you have a marketable product.
Click to expand...


I am still trying to figure out how you make so much money on so little land. If you are selling organic, then you have the registration cost, plus inspection costs to the USDA which would be around $10,000. so that would be over 13,333lbs of squash just to cover that cost, not mention gas, seed, lime. It comes out to about 40 acres of squash to cover cost and make the profit.
Next is the pumpkins, on good ground that is irrigated we can only get 4 bins per acre, 2 bins if not irrigated. A bin is a pallet with the 3ft high cardboard sides. A bin only brings $190.
I am in the heart of vegetable farmers, a bunch of italians that their families have been raising vegetables for generations.
They are not pulling that kind of money off of an acre. I hayed just under 100 acres this year, all said and done my profit is going to be around $3,000. My equipment payments a year are $6,000. Please post how you are doing it. I could sell some of my bigger equipment, pay off half of my mortgage and make more money doing 3 or 4 acres with alot less work.
 
Matt,

The farm down the street is certified organic. They sell shares for $500.00 as part of their CPA (or what ever it's called), they also sell their squash and vegetables to Boston produce markets and to the Islands of Nantucket and Martha's VIneyard.
We sell to them for 75 cents a pound. We do not use any fertilizers just manure and can get alot of squash per plant. It's never ending how much we can pick. We have wide rows so they really spread out and they do. Even when I sold to local restruants at half the super market price...with next to no overhead...it's a money maker. We, my partner and me are inspected by the farm down the street and as far us having to come up with $10,000...we don't...they do.
As for pumpkins if I can sell a 100 pound pumpkin in flawless condition for $30.00 each it doesn't take much to get a lot of money. If I get 2 or 3 pumpkins per 10 square feet for the smaller pumpkins that adds up too.
JimDawg from this forum told me about selling to the farm down the street, last year he got $2000 for growing squash on one acre.
I don't know...fertile soil? I have 2 feet of top soil built up from 50 years of manure...so does JimDawg. So maybe that helps.
As for haying my friend that I buy hay from has $100,000 into his equipment and I think he said he got 18,000 bays...I'll find out for sure tonight...when I give him a call.
Next spring I'll keep really accurate records and post those...
 
I rent out all of my tillable land. The piece near my house and one about 5 miles from me. I get the tax break on the land and the rental income pretty much covers my taxes. I have enough land left to put in a large truck garden to do the roadside stand thing, which I have yet to do. Also put in about 20 high bush blueberrie plants and a patch of rasberries, have friends who have made there play money from these type crops. One or two acres of asparagus is very profitable if you are in the right growing zone, the bed takes 3 years before you can harvest and the short growing season is pretty labor intensive.
 
wow, I can't believe a farm that is certified organic would risk loseing its certification forever, by selling a product from another location not inspected by the USDA.
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he must be doing square bales they do bring more money per ton then round bales. However they are much more labor intensive.
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I am just trying to figure out how your a bringing in more money per acre then we do per 10 acres.
I would like to some pictures of your squash fields.
 
Matt,
I'll scan pix of the pumpkins tomorrow and post.
Also you probably aren't getting 75 cents a pound,right? We have the longest growing season in all of New England with the
warmest average temp so that helps. If you look at the map of the east coast and see Cape Cod there is Buzzards Bay. Which is the bay we are on...hence Buzzardwing from this forum's name. The Gulf Stream brings warm water up the coast and keeps us snow free and much warmer than inland towns in the winter and spring. And cooler in the summer with ocean breezes. We also have great soil, my land is on a glacier river plain and was a goat dairy farm for many many years. People were stealing my soil before I had the papers passed on the farm while it was vacant. I really don't know what else to tell you.
I also would have mentioned the name of the farm that buys our produce but suspected they could get in trouble. They seem to be doing very well...they sponsor all kinds of local events.

Keith's bales are square bales and his hay is sold long before the summer is over. Most fields can get get 3 cuts which helps.
Some guys in Dighton say they get 4 cuts??? That is crazy!! That I don't believe.

Chris
 
When I first grew pumpkins many, many years ago I could never have ones as big as my uncle grew. Well one day I asked him his secret. He said what you had to do was take a five gallon bucket, drill a very small hole in it. Then he said to insert about a foot of the smallest possible diameter hose in the hole and seal around it good.

After the plants were in the ground I was to place a bucket by each plant and fill it with water and leave it alone all summer. The idea was that the water would seep out over the summer real slow and give each plant just the right amount of water to grow big and strong.

Since our plants were on another piece of land that I had owned but seldom visited I thought this would work well. After about five months I had forgotten about our pumpkin patch so I thought I better go see how things were going. When I got there all I saw was pumpkins about the size of golf balls. But, the field was full of 55 gallon barrels. Well, I called my uncle and he said he would come over to check it out.

When he got there he went over to the first three plants and checked everything that I had done. I finally asked why I had small pumpkins and 55 gallon barrels in my garden.

He looked me right in the eye and said “You dern fool! You put the hose in backwards.”
 
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