You already know what you’re going to plant on most of your acres, but what about those “flexible” acres that impact final planting decisions? The University of Illinois developed a spreadsheet to guide you through those decisions.

Their new spreadsheet allows you to calculate per-acre budgets for different crops, which can be used to analyze various lease arrangements, develop a whole farm budget and calculate crop breakeven prices. You can then project financial statements and calculate return sensitivities as variables change, while also figuring in the effect of crop insurance and hedging strategies and preparing a basic cash flow statement.

We’re featuring the spreadsheet as our Farm Futures Spreadsheet of the Month. The 3,032 kilobyte spreadsheet should work with Excel 2000, 2002, 2007, 2010 or Excel XP. You can download it by clicking on the link below.

Do you have a spreadsheet that’s made a difference on your operation that you’d be willing to share with other readers? Drop us a line at [email protected] with a description of the spreadsheet. We’ll pay $75 if we feature your farmer-written non-commercial program as our Spreadsheet of the Month.