Get ready for the new cropping season. The University of Nebraska Extension has announced the annual series of crop production clinics set for eight locations across the state during the month of January. These clinics will offer practical, profitable, environmentally sound and high-impact training for farmers and ag professionals, according to the Nebraska Extension.

The clinics will cover a myriad of topics, including soil fertility, water and irrigation, insect pests, plant diseases, weeds, cropping systems, agribusiness management and marketing. Locations for 2025 include the following:

Pesticide applicator recertification will be offered in general standards, ag plant and demonstration/research categories; and credits will be available for certified crop advisers in crop production, nutrient management, integrated pest management, water management and precision agriculture.

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Register online at agronomy.unl.edu/cpc.

Crop budgets ready for 2025

Budgeting will be even more important in 2025, with crop margins as tight as they are.

The 2025 University of Nebraska-Lincoln crop budget projections for the coming growing season were created using assumptions thought to be valid for many producers in Nebraska; however, each farming operation is unique and, therefore, the budgets should be used as a guide when creating your own. The budgets are grouped by crop and provided currently in multiple formats including Excel and printable pdf files using the Excel format and the Agricultural Budget Calculator (ABC) program.

The current Nebraska crop budgets provide both a cash cost per unit of production and a total cost of production or economic cost per unit for each crop. The cash cost figure does not include the ownership cost of machinery and equipment used in field operations or a real estate opportunity cost, while the total cost figure in the budgets is an economic total cost that includes depreciation and opportunity costs of ownership using the assumption that the operator is a landowner. The budgets assume that the operator is the landowner by showing an opportunity cost of ownership. Producers who lease ground should adjust the land cost by noting a rental rate or share lease percentage.

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With the development of the new ABC program, rather than using the Excel template, the crop budgets can be downloaded in the ABC program and then modified to fit individual farm operation enterprises.

For more information on crop budget content, call Robert Klein at 308-696-6705.

To learn more about the budgets and to customize the UNL crop budgets using the new ABC program, call Glennis McClure at 402-472-0661. Training sessions on the new enterprise budgeting program are scheduled on an ongoing basis. Visit cap.unl.edu/abc/training.