Dryland Wheat 2024

Cost of Production per bushel

Updated December 13, 2023

Where do the numbers come from?

Preparation

This cost is for some wheat after wheat acres. I'm not going to offer any opinion on putting wheat after wheat. We have some this year, whether we will in future years or not, well, time will tell.

Because of that, there is some chemical cost as well as farming cost involved in getting the field to where it was ready to drill. These calculation are for spraying it once and working it twice.

Seed

It's December as I write this, so the wheat seed is past any decision-making stage. We purchased some registered seed from a couple of different suppliers. Depending on how new the variety was our pricing ranged from $19.25 to 22.50 per 60 pound bushel. This was the price picked up at the seed dealer, so there will be some freight cost involved on getting it back to the farm and ready to put in the drill. I'm averaging the cost per bushel and then adding $.25 to cover some freight. That comes out to 21.125, round that up a bit and the seed cost for this breakeven is at 21.15 per 60 pound bushel.

I have 85 pounds of seed per acre. In reality, the seeding rate varied based on when it was drilled, how many seeds per pound it was, and how particular I was the day it went in the ground. This numbers give a seed cost of right at $30.00 per acre.

Starter Fertilizer

We put on a starter fertilizer with our drill. Ten gallons per acre of a blend gives a cost of right around $30.

Upcoming expenses

There is still going to need to be some more fertilizer applied. I originally had some dry fertilizer in these calculations, but took them out because it was just pretty hard to make any money with that. Depending on how well last year's wheat yielded may also make a difference on what you figure is carryover fertilizer from the previous crop.

Weed control and fungicide decisions will also need to be made. There are some numbers in the crop for those, but pricing may need to be adjusted.