Growing the Future

Know Your Numbers: Down To The Field

Episode Summary

Dean Klippenstine and Mike Palmier of MNP return for the third session in the Know Your Numbers benchmarking series, moving the lens from the whole farm down to the individual field. Drawing on an agronomy benchmark covering 318,000 acres across 57 farms in west central Saskatchewan, they walk through what a real profit map looks like, why the gap in crop input spending between top producers and average ones is small compared to the gap in decision quality, and what happens to gross margin the later a field gets seeded. The tension is that most operators can tell you their farm's bottom line and cannot tell you which fields are actually earning it, and the two guests are blunt about how few producers have ever done the math field by field. Producers walk away with a working definition of a profit map, a specific example of what seeding date costs a crop in a bad year, and a harder question about whether every acre they farm deserves to still be in the operation.

Episode Notes

A farm and its neighbour, same region, same growing conditions, can sit $187 an acre apart in what actually gets made. That gap decides what gets paid down, what gets replaced, and eventually what gets passed on.

This is the third session in MNP's Know Your Numbers series. The first two took the conversation from the books to the whole-farm benchmark. This one goes past the fence line and into the field.

What's Inside

What a profit map actually is: gross margin minus labour, power and machinery, deliberately stripped of capital structure so it is not just a proxy for farm size
The Soil Intellect Map, MNP's own layering of electrical conductivity and topography, and what it is built to find
Why the spread in crop input spending between top producers and average ones turned out small, and why the real gap sits somewhere else entirely
What gross margin by seeding date actually shows, and why canola punishes a late start harder than wheat does
A live guess from the room on what share of farms know their gross margin field by field, and how far off the real number was
Ransom land: the term for the acres you keep farming only because they came bundled with the ground you actually want
Why some of the most successful farms are also the most likely to let a weak field coast, simply because it is easy to ignore when the rest of the operation is carrying it

Related Episodes

Connect with Dean Klippenstine:
MNP: mnp.ca/en/personnel/dean-klippenstine
LinkedIn: Dean Klippenstine

Connect with Mike Palmier:
MNP: mnp.ca

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