Harvest is approaching with large corn and soybean crops on the way and managing those bushels will be critical this year. The University of Illinois has developed a spreadsheet that will help with this never ending task. This tool will allow the farm to track grain inventories by landowner, field, and storage location. Once the crop is in the bin, transaction records can be kept for sales, forward pricing, grain fed to livestock, transfers, LDPs and CCC loan transactions. The designers of the spreadsheet have left it up to the farmer to determine how much detail is kept in the spreadsheet.

MANAGE BUSHELS: Spreadsheet helps you keep track of on-farm production.

To get this program up and running a farmer needs landowner information, crop planted, number of acres planted, storage location, and production location or field information. Once the initial data is entered, it is a simple process to track sales or on farm use of the crop through the year.

We're featuring the spreadsheet as our Farm Futures Spreadsheet of the Month. The 882-kilobyte spreadsheet should work with Excel 2000, 2002, 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 noncommercial program as our Spreadsheet of the Month.