Cost of production budgets with the ability to make changes on the fly will offer farmers flexibility when doing cash flow planning this winter.

Historically, crop budgets have been a static publication that could be used to get a rough idea of costs on a farm, but could not be easily manipulated to fit an individual operation. Roger Wilson and Robert Klein at the University of Nebraska have developed a set of crop budgets that allow the user to make changes in the operations and inputs with a series of drop down menus.

FLEXIBLE APPROACH: Spreadsheet offers crop budgets you can use for 2013.

This spreadsheet format for these budgets allows the farm to enter its own prices for fuel, fertilizer, chemicals, labor, and interest rate to customize the budget to any farm. The spreadsheet contains 53 farmer reviewed baseline budgets with several options for corn, soybeans, and winter wheat. In addition, there are several budgets for less common crops like sugarbeets, dry beans, proso millet, and sunflowers.

We're featuring the spreadsheet as our Farm Futures Spreadsheet of the Month. The 4.06-megabyte spreadsheet should work with Excel 2000, 2002, 2010 or Excel XP. You can download it by clicking 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.