Breaking Even and Beyond: Turn Data into Dollars in 2025
As a farmer, you know the weight of every dollar spent and every bushel harvested. The margin between profit and loss can often feel as razor-thin as the edge of a combine blade. But what if you had a tool that not only simplified your calculations but also provided clarity on your farm's financial health?
Enter Compeer Financial's Grain Margin Manager—a user-friendly resource designed to put actionable insights at your fingertips. By helping you calculate everything from land and machinery costs to your whole farm budget and costs of production, the Margin Manager equips you to make decisions that protect and grow your bottom line.
We recognize every operation is different, so we encourage users to enter their own numbers into the tool. But if you’d prefer, we calculate a baseline cost of production for corn and soybeans annually and input it in the tool as a general guide for costs and profitability.
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2025 Grain Farm Cost Projections
For 2025, we project cost of production for corn at $909 per acre or $4.33 per bushel with a 210 bushel per acre yield goal. That’s $36 per acre lower than in 2024, with the most significant savings stemming from a $48 per acre decrease in land costs. However, not all costs are trending down. Direct input costs, including fertilizers, have risen by $12 per acre.
For soybeans, the story is similar. The cost of production is forecast at $662 per acre or $11.03 per bushel, based on a 60 bushels per acre yield goal. This represents a $42 per acre decrease from 2024, largely due to a $60 per acre reduction in land costs. Yet, soybean input costs have also edged up, rising $18 per acre due to higher fertilizer expenses.
Land costs are budgeted at $252 per acre for corn and $240 per acre for soybeans. While likely lower than the current market, they match up with the historical relationship of rent as a percentage of the crop revenue. In reality, land costs have likely not decreased much, if any from last year as landowner’s real estate taxes and cost of living has continued to increase.
Compeer uses the historical relationship of rent as a percentage of the crop revenue to project the 2025 rental costs. History shows that typically 30% of the revenue from a corn crop goes towards rent and 40% of the revenue from a soybean crop goes to rent. For new crop corn we are projecting a price of $4.00 per bushel at 210 bushels per acre. That means the revenue per corn acre is $840 with typical land costs of $252 per acre ($840 x 30%). For soybeans, we project $10.00 per bushel with an average yield of 60 bushels, making the revenue per soybean acre $600 and the typical land cost $240 per acre ($600 x 40%).
Based on Compeer’s projected cost of production and new crop 2025 harvest prices, losses are projected at $69 per acre on corn and $62 per acre on soybeans.
Application On Your Farm
By inputting your own numbers into the Grain Margin Manager tool, you can move beyond these average estimates and understand precisely when you'll breakeven—and when you'll thrive.
If there is a profit margin available in the market today that meets your operations goals, consider starting making new crop sales. If there isn’t a profit margin today that you’re comfortable with then put in some working orders to get sales made if your profit targets hit.
From cost of production to land and machinery cost per acre and a whole farm budget, having clear-cut numbers can help you make informed decisions and set your grain farm up for success in 2025.
Start tracking your profitability today with Compeer’s free Grain Margin Manager.