Title: Project 1 Audit
Course: MASTER-AGRI-1172-HB-2017-Malone > Section: Basic Hardware Fundamentals

Find out how much overlap costs the average farmer that doesn’t invest in precision equipment.  Work through a couple of scenarios I give you and then do an audit on yourself or any other producer that doesn’t have swath control.

Example1,

I have 900 acres of row crop farming.  I have 450 acres of corn and 450 acres of soybeans.  I farm many contours and figure that I overlap eight percent (7% is average).  How much money am I losing to overlap?

450 x .08 = 36 aces of corn and 36 acres of soybeans.  Corn seed cost $250 per bag and Soybean seed cost $50 per unit.  I figure I am losing about 50 bushel per acre yield on the corn ground in the overlapped areas.  I plant 27500 seeds per acre on corn and 150,000 seed per acre on soybeans.

Corn:

36 acres x 50 bushel = 1800 bu x $3.50 price = $6300

36 acres x 27500 plants / 80,000 (seed per bag) = 12.375 bags x $250 per bag = $3093.75

Soybeans:

36 acres x 150,000 seeds / 140,000 (seeds per unit)= 38.6 units x $50 per unit = $1930

Total cost yearly is estimated at $11323.75

Average cost of a planting system is approximately $20000.  Return on investment is 1.76 years.

Complete the audit, save, then upload the document for the project by clicking on the Project Title.

This assignment has a point value of:  20 points