It’s time to take yield contests to the next level.

Yield contest by themselves are fun. Who doesn’t love to see how many bushels can be produced?  Corn yields of 299 bushels per acre were produced in both North Dakota and South Dakota last year. The top North Dakota yield in the National Wheat Yield Contest was 110 bushels per acre. A grower set a South Dakota soybean yield record with nearly 114 bushels per acre.

Yield contests are also valuable. You can pick up tips on how other farmers are producing high yields bushels. The soybean record was set with lots of manure and fertilizer, no-till, cover crops, and a low plant population — just 90,000 plants per acre.

But I think the next thing we need — especially in these tougher economic times on the farm — is a breakeven price contest.

Such a contest has been suggested before. But no one has figured out how to make it work. Which costs would be used? How would you know if the reported costs were real? I imagine that the entries would have to be independently verified by a third party, just like yields in yield contests. But we’re already partway there with farm business management program records. You’d think something similar could be used.

I am hearing so many stories about low breakeven prices from people involved in the soil health and regenerative ag movement that they are hard to believe. Is it possible to grow corn for a $1.45 per bushel? A North Carolina grower who won his state yield contest last year with cover crops, no fertilizer and an open-pollinated corn variety got his field to produce 312 bushels per acre. He spoke at the North Dakota Soil Health Summit in Bismarck.

Don’t believe it? I can’t either — not without proof anyway. That why a breakeven contest would be cool. We could see the books. We could start taking some of the claims seriously. We could see what’s possible — not just how high yields can go — but also how low breakeven prices can really be.