Can you make money with small equiptment in corn?

Ok, I do not farm, but I'd think corn is 'hungry', so fertilizer cost(Nitorgen) would be high?? Then there's the tilling every so often, etc.

As a 'cash crop', I think garlic would be profitable. Bugs don't like it, deer don't, easy to plant and harvest.Get a few local restaurants onboard might presell all you can grow!

just food for thought , no pun intended.
Jay

you would actually be surprised how cheap it is to use real herbicides on conventional corn too. Urea and such can get expensive, but if you have a good rotation it helps cut the costs considerably

Commercial corn; probably not. Sweet corn, pop corn, possibly grown organically, you might make a few dollars.

I was also able to make a fair amount of cash off of 6 acres of corn and 6 of soybeans even after all the expenses

I'm curious too.

no problem! id love to share!

Started my freshman year of high school when I bought a 494 deere planter set for 36 inch rows off craigslist for $150. didn't end up using it that year as I planted a very large truck garden with some of my friends. wasn't very profitable. but bought a acre of standing corn and picked it for our steers which was good

the next year I went "big" picked up three acres of ground to rent off a uncles friend. planted it to soybeans with aa John Deere 4520 of m grandpas and deere 750 drill I rented from a dealer. on another 3 acres at home I planted another 3 acres of corn with that 494 planter. turns out the planter wasn't that accurate so I had my neighbor replant it with his 6 row white planter. to thin the corn out I planted with the 494 I used a 6 row 3 point cultivator on a 190 XT. I bought the chemicals off of the guy dad farms for and had him spray it. was pretty cost effective that way. picked it all with a WD and new idea picker. in the fall I picked up more ground which had been grass for 20 years. I got a friend who is into old tractors help me. it made for a enjoyable day.

this year I planted everything with a John Deere 7000 planter. about half the ground was worked and the rest was no-till. I bought a set of cultivators for the WD that summer and mounted the 6 row on the 4520, but never used them as the herbicide worked so good. didn't pick any that year beause I got out of the cattle showing business and my younger brother didn't want to buy any ear corn. I did buy a Gleaner L2 off my cousins for $7000 with both heads and about 5 pick up loads of parts. I had the same deal on chemicals as the year before. 20 acres of corn and beans was a nice little chunk of change

this next year I have doubled my ground again and am up to about 40 acres. this is a run down of the equipment that I used though the years and if I still use it.

15 foot Brillion Cultimukcher_ makes the best seed bed ever!
20 foot brady field cultivator- is good for secondary tillage and smoothing stuff out
12 foot international disk- did decent, but this disk is gone
14 foot BWF deere disk- does a pretty good job
New Idea 323 picker- about top of the line
deere 18 corn picker- with rubber rolls it does a great job husking
oliver #5 picker_decent, but sold it to a collector
3 bottom Allis Chalmers Snap coupler plow- still have it
3 bottom deere pull type- still have it
various wagons- still have them all
a Gehl 100 feed grinder- does a really good job.

there is some other stuff to but this is most of it. now it is really over kill so this is what I think would be the minimum

3-4 plow tractor, WD,WD-45 D-17
a 10 or 12 foot disk
a cultimulcher or cultipacker
set of clutivators for which ever tractor you use if you go that route
a good picker
a sheller
hammermill or grinder
good number of contacts in your phone or address book

you don't NEED all this to start, although it helps. sometimes its good to find some one to borrow stuff off of. if you have any questions feel free to PM me!

im with Gerald. a 1 bottom plow is ok for a garden, but a 3-14 or a 2-16 would be the smallest I would go with. but I also think I would go with a 10-12 foot disk vs. a 6 foot. most 6 footers are cheap TSC ones or old horse drawn ones you couldn't take down the road as easy. hiring 30 acres for combine isn't bad, but I can tell that you, like me want to do as much of it as you can. so you may want to look into a small K or F combine. picking corn takes a long time especially one row at a time. although you can leave it in the field

I started out cheap.

WC w/cultivator - $800
7' JD KB pull-type disc - $150
IH 456 2-row trip-lift planter - $150
MM 2-14 trip plow (would have rather had a little genius!) - $50
AC one row picker (piece of junk - get a New Idea or JD) - $100
Case wagon with sideboards - $350

Back then DeKalb 689 seed corn was $70 per bag and bagged fertilize 12-24-24 was $120 per ton too. Ammonia Nitrate in the bag was 200 #/ton. I borrowed my Dad's 600 ford and whirly-bird spreader to topdress. Made 140 bu/ac that first year cultivating with the WC - no chemicals.

I had a lot of time on my hands back then, 5 ac tobacco and 10 acres of sweet corn sold on the fresh market to make the farm payment. The feed-corn crop was just icing on the cake - but made a little money to help things along.

But, what made money (on everything) was keeping the fixed overhead low - old, cost effective equipment.

I pulled a 14 foot disk with a WD the first year and what Gerald said about pulling it faster is right. that same disk pulled with a 130 horse 4520 made a big difference. A 7000 is a great planter but may be a little expensive for you. I might recommend getting a Allis no till planter. they are pretty accurate and most wear parts are available.

I've found that the best seed bed I ever mad was plowing sod in the fall, followed by a pass with the cultimulcher with the teeth all the way down and then disking and using the cultimulcher again. although for most of it on pass with the disk then once with the cultimulcher was perfect if the ground was farmed the year before

I make it work year after year. The farm pays for my toys in the toy box.

It looks like I severely underestimated how much time and equipment would be needed.

I figured a few days plowing, a day to disk, and a day to plant,  then throughout the first month a few days to cultivate.   And in the fall a week or so to harvest.  I had planned to store the whole ear corn in a corn crib.  I hadn't thought about a wagon to get it from the picker to the crib or how to get it into the crib other than by hand.

I knew the corn would have to eventually (by me or who I sell it to ) be shelled and ground/milled but hadn't thought much about it yet.

Although even with having to buy a plow, planter, disk, cultivator, a picker, and a corn crib (I couldn't find any small cultivators so I don't know what they cost) it would be possible to break even the first year (I wouldn't be paying rent for the land so that helps a lot).

I looked on Craigslist for old two row equipment.  It appears to be much more valuable than I had expected.  Which probably means that whoever is buying it plans to use it rather than it going for scrap.

After all the advice everyone here has given me I think I would be biting off more than I care to chew if I were to do the 30 acres in corn.  Although I think I may do a much smaller patch of sweet corn that I would hand plant and pick but use the plow, disk and cultivator I already have/have access to.  That way I will still get a taste for farming and get to play with my toys/equipment.

Marketing is still most important. The best crop is useless if it can't be sold. The farm I bought had been rented by tenants for half a century. I hired it chisel plowed to break up hard pan, did soil testing and had lime applied. I planted alfalfa with an oats crop and the next year did sell hay. The first year I sold some oats and oat straw bales that I hired combined and baled. The nearest oat buyers were not the nearest elevators, so I had long hauls. I had a 1 ton flat bed dually truck that hauled bales and seed well except for getting only 7 mpg. I joined Iowa Farm Bureau and advertised hay bales in their weekly paper. It was a bother going to the farm to sell a bale at a time and I wasted a bunch trying to store them outside under plastic. Rotted lots of them. A hay rack or two was essential to get the hay bales off the field. I hitched one behind the baler and hired a couple HS or college kids to stack. Paid a couple bucks over minimum wage. The small school sports coaches are good sources of such helpers that like the exercise to build muscle. One of them, a pitcher would side arm the bales. Wrestlers built mountains on the racks.

I borrowed a drill and its still in the shed. And there's another expense, a place to store hay, seed, and equipment. Equipment old or new doesn't do well stored outside.

Then I shifted to a 6 year rotation with the farm broken into 4 acre patches. Oats/alfalfa, two years alfalfa production, corn, beans, corn. For corn I applied some MAP as soil tests showed K very high. First year corn got its N from the alfalfa, last year corn got some N applied. After about a decade of that my custom combiner offered to combine for $22 an acre instead of $25 if the whole place was one crop and about then I figured out that hay sales (when paid for, not every customer paid so I quit selling hay) were much smaller than commodity corn income and buying N instead of raising it was way more profitable. Until he started truck hauling too, I used his wagons to haul crop to the elevator behind my 4020 after I got it for greater crop clearance for cultivation and eventually spraying and side dressing.

Then I went no till for a few years and at age 67 decided I wanted less exercise and more freedom to travel and rented the place out crop share. With big machinery my tenant sprays the place in an hour or less, plants at least as fast and harvests in less than three hours. So far every time there's been a combine on the place I've been riding but not driving. That has been a good way to see how the crop did in the various soils and wet and high spots and how the weed control has been. I figured the annual maintenance (and fuel) costs of a vintage combine replacing rotted rubber parts and the battery would have cost me more than hiring the combining.

Plowing the place with the 4020 and AC plow took 1/3 the time as plowing with the MF-135 and 2.5 times the fuel.

Successful weed control with cultivation requires two or three passes with the rotary hoe at three day intervals after planting, then at least two passes with the row crop cultivator, the second pass when the crop is headed towards a foot tall and with the shovels set to toss dirt into the row to smother weeds in the row. Our springs were so wet I only completed the full sequence about half the years. One year I anticipated drought so I could experiment, and I added shovels to the planter and it was the first pass across the field. No till without chemicals. I did get the best even planting of corn ever with the cyclo 400. I planned to hit the field with the row cultivator a few days after sprouting, but it rained for two weeks and the weeds took off. I mowed the weeds down to the top of the corn and beans probably nipping the tassels tops off the young corn. Those beans made 20 bushels to the acre (otherwise in the 40s) and there weren't enough ears on the corn at harvest time to replace the seed so I didn't have it combined. The deer and the pheasants didn't get much either.

I looked at the place as where I was going to build a house and a place to play outside. I still haven't built the house but I did get to be outside a lot. Any profit was gravy. My tenant works more acres than I did and the profits are good so far. We'll see how the world markets and the new farm bill do.

Speaking of farm bill, you have only until the end of February to update base acre assignments and yields if any and future crop payments are based on base acres and yield. Without proof of yield your yields are set at the county average for the crop of the base acres. You have until March 31 to select a program, ARC-CO, PLC,  or ARC-IC. There are not clear pointers about which to select. ARC-CO is based on county yield and national average price, ARC-IC is based on individual farm yield but takes a lower fraction of proven yield to kick in and PLC is based purely on the national average crop cash price. Many are going ARC-CO because it looks like it will pay for 2014, and 2015 and some think it will pay more for those two years than PLC will pay in 5 years. There are page after page of discussions over on New Ag Talks Crops and no one has proven any one program better. If not selected by March 31, farms will be put in PLC and not paid for 2014.  Yesterday my tenant and I decided PLC looks better in the long run with falling commodity prices. There is also an annual choice to participate or not and that sign up period hasn't been set yet.

Gerald J.

that new farm program is kinda crap shoot...and it should lower a lot of cash rents for famers.

Les Royer wrote: I grow arronia berries here. Takes about 5 years to get started, but it pays $32,000 an acre before harvesting costs. Your only field expense is mowing. NO CHEMICALS NEEDED. IT'S ALL CERTIFIED ORGANIC

holy crap, guess I should look into that. I think I can spare an acre or two for some bushes. Who do you sell them to?

I don't have to sell them to anybody. I just harvest and deliver to wholesale guy. Google sawmill hollow farms. That's where I deliver them to. It's the largest organic aronia berry farm located in North America. They're located in Missouri Valley, Iowa. Some guys have machines to pick them but mine is done by hand. Last year the local high school girls soccer team picked them. They loved the $600 check I gave them. Beats the $5 car washes they do to raise money they say. I got 800 bushes on 1 acre. Fully grown they produce 20-30 lbs per plant @ $2.50 per lb. You do the math. As with any flowering fruit, there's always the possibility of a late damaging frost or spring hail, so there are occasional setbacks.