How to start Row Crop operation without MILLIONS

hey everybody welcome back to southern Iowa we have a different type of video for you today where I actually answer one of your questions but before we get to that I want to thank all of my older subscribers you guys have been awesome you guys have helped support this channel where it can grow by continuing to watch the videos and give them the thumbs up so thank you guys but we also want to welcome our new subscribers and it's actually your first time watching this channel this channel focuses on things that I do as a 28 year old farmer and from time to time I throw in a fun video where I like I go and go farm plus you get to hang out with my dog bandit how about but the other night when I was reading the comments which I try and read all the comments and they respond to the ones that I can a viewer asked what equipment does it take to get into row cropping that got me thinking hey it might be a fun video to make where I hypothetically go on a purchasing spree to buy the equipment that I need to get in the row cropping now this video is going to be 100% opinion based and I would like to hear your guys's opinion on this hypothetical situation in the comment section below but in no way shape or form am i downplaying the difficulty there is to start a row cropping operation take it from a 28 year old farmer that's bootstrapping his own but before we get into this purchasing spree we're gonna make some assumptions and set some parameters the first thing that we're gonna assume is that you already have a land base to farm the second thing that we're gonna assume is that you have the knowledge and the skills how to operate equipment and grow the crop and the last thing that we're going to assume is that you actually have the working capital to grow that crop and now moving forward or I guess around the shop and circles here as I talk with you guys we're gonna set some parameters parameter being number one unfortunately guys we are not multimillionaires where we can just go to the nearest dealership and buy all our of our equipment new but we do need to go to the other end of the spectrum and that is is that we aren't going into farming in a hobby sense which there's absolutely nothing wrong with going into farming in a hobby essence where that gives people the ability to kind of understand what we do is row crop farmer so I'll encourage in any way I can but we are gonna have a realistic budget so we're not going for the equipment that's just to get it done situation where it kind of looks like it was me and Andrew planting that fun plot this summer so the parameter is is that we're not becoming hobby farmers and we're also not multimillionaires so we're gonna have a realistic budget set for our current AG economy which actually I need a plug another channel here mark brach just did a video on this on his channel which I thought was great is he actually takes a bushel of corn and then he takes out everything that needs to directly grow that bushel corn which is called the cost of goods sold such as land cost fertilizer seed and chemicals then he shows you what you have left in that bucket which is the stuff that you have to live on as a farmer to grow into the future and also pay all the other expenses that aren't directly called cost of goods sold so now that the parameters are set the bankers on board let's get to the fun part and start buying some equipment and then shortly after the non fun part of paying for the equipment so let's start looking for our tractor for this example I'm mainly gonna use John Deere tractors because that's what I'm more knowledgeable on versus like a CNH tractor or an egg Co tractor so when I was looking for a tractor it really came down to three things that I was looking at the size of the tractor the jobs that was going to be doing in the cost of ownership now the size of the tractor and the jobs that it's going to be doing can kind of correlate into the same thing so we're gonna kind of group those together and when it comes to John Deere for row crop we're gonna throw out the five series class and just say you have basically four series classes that you can choose from four row crops so we're going to start out all the way at the top with the big boys the four-wheel drive tractors that are the nine series tractors these tractors are really really good for doing things such as pulling like pulling tillage tools and hydrous applicators things of that nature also some of them are equipped with three points and PTO systems that way you could pull things with the three point you can plant with these tractors some we'll do plant with these tractors and you can also run grain carts that's what these guys are main houses for their heavy tractors usually high horsepower with lots of pulling power but for this operation that's really not the tractor that we're looking for and so after we get out of the nine series tractors we drop down into the eight series and the 7 Series tractors which I would consider to be your row crop style tractors your row crop series tractors they are fixed framed they don't swim well in the middle they have usually a front will assist on an 8 Series tractor most of the time they make excellent planting tractors they can do just about everything that you really need them to do they might not be able to pull as big of tillage implements they would might not be able to do things like that and they're not as heavy as a 9 series tractor but they really do make excellent grain cart tractors and they make excellent planting tractors the downside to the series tractors is that their frames are usually a little bit longer which means that their turning radius is as good but heck nowadays it's like you can get up to like 500 horsepower or something like that and row crop series tractors like that's absolutely crazy our biggest tractor is only 425 horsepower and that's that 9400 you guys just saw bet ago so now we're gonna actually skip the 7 Series tractor because that's the tractor that I'm gonna go with for our little theoretical operation here and we're gonna jump down to the 6 Series tractor which is would be like the 64 30 right here talk about why those are really good and maybe why they're not what we're looking for these 6 Series tractors which I would actually consider this to be a 6 Series tractor as well typically around that 100 horsepower range their claim to fame is Tang operations and chor tractors they're lighter and well nowadays you can actually get really high horsepower in them but they didn't used to come with higher horsepower which I don't really think a new 6 Series frame tractors actually truly what this would be as someone might be able to correct me there but anyways this here would be a little bit too light to be doing tillage work and or planting work it could still probably do it it could still probably pool a 12-foot disc maybe and it could pull six to eight row plane or I would be guessing your issue will run into is you can't put duals onto this particular model it's gonna be a little bit lighter weight so it's not gonna have the pulling umph but for doing chores and hang these things are absolutely fantastic so kind of like I alluded to there canon gave a spoiler alert i would choose a 7 Series tractor for our theoretical operation what I like about the 7 Series tractor is that in the future their wheelbase is shorter so they do turn pretty good so you could hay with it in the future it has the ability to do tour tractors you can put the loaders on it you can do things of that nature in the future with that tractor if you want it as well in a 7 Series tractor you can get pretty darn good horsepower put into them their weights different and so that would be really the perfect mesh between the eight series tractor and the six series tractor where you could do some tillage work you could plant with it really well and you could even hay with it if you wanted to add that to your operation so now that we've determined the size and we obviously know what it's going to be doing it's going to be doing planting we need to also now determine what our cost of ownership might be now the cost of ownership can be broken down into a few different categories one of them being the depreciation slash resale value of that piece of equipment and this is maybe where one of the two John Deere claims the fame is is one John Deere has a fantastic part network the other one is as John Deere's resale values happen to be very very good and now I'm not saying you can go out there and buy a new tractor with the are after it and you're not gonna eat a bunch of depreciation that's not what I'm talking about here I'm saying that older John Deere equipment especially low oured well taken care of John Deere equipment seems to hold its value very very well but it also takes more money to get into a John Deere pieces of equipment versus say something else and that's another part of the resale value slash cost of ownership so say for math example here say you purchased these tractors at the same exact time and they respect the same exact way but this one was $5,000 cheaper than that one right there that's your initial at purchase price well now let's jump down the road five years later you've put two thousand hours on these tractors and you go to sell them granted now they're exactly SPECT exact the same they're in the exact same condition and you go to sell them this tractor here would then sell eight thousand dollars less than that tractor right there and that's where John Deere's kind of claimed the fame comes in is the fact that if this one right here sold for $8,000 less than this one even though this one cost $5,000 more to begin with in theory this one cost you $3,000 less to own over those years so that's where you get your resale value however say you're just gonna buy your tractor and you don't really care about thinking about reselling and in the future you're gonna use it for the rest of your life resale value doesn't really mean that much to you and in that instance I'd say go with your bang for your buck so the next factor about the cost of ownership of the tractor nobody will really know is though is the repairs that you're gonna have to actually put into that tractor but in this situation where we're looking for an older tractor we can kind of look up the lineage of a tractor and kind of the history and how it performs and I'll give you guys an example and that example is going to be the tractor that I purchased with my father which was the John Deere 8110 when looking for these tractors you can get on the internet read about the tractors like look up 10 Series John Deere and O series John Deere and when you're looking that stuff up they'll tell you the problems that they have and things of that like that but when I was looking up the 10 series I know series tractor you would just be amazed by the amount of people that say they get to ten thousand hours without having any issues or twenty thousand hours without having issues so you can kind of look up the lineage of the tractor and know if there was problem trial tractors maybe they didn't put out the best type of tractor or if these are mechanically really pretty darn sound tractors and then on top of that you can actually look up the history of that tractor kind of get the feeling of what the previous owner was doing with the factor was a given an easy life or was it really dogged out and having to do some hard hard stuff those are both things though also correspond to the price of the tractor you'll usually be a little bit higher but in return your price of your repair should be a little bit lower so if Ben was to go out and search for a 7 Series tractor which tractor would it be I would choose to go with the John Deere 78 10 I really like those tractors I actually hope the owned one at some point in time would be a 78 10 they got an 8 one motor in them I think that those 4 this theoretical operation would be the ticket so now we've either gone to the dealership or an auction fired off our first check gotten our tractor now we just have to find the planter we're gonna pull now in terms of equipment the planer is actually where I would stick a healthy percentage of my capital that I have available to that invest in and the reason I say that is because that planter is responsible for putting your crop into the ground and that crop is what's responsible for giving you a return at harvest so what would I choose as a planner well I kind of have a little bit of a bias we haven't really talked much about it on the channel yet and because I haven't actually shot the introduction to the channel but I am actually an AG leader dealer so for our hypothetical operation I would just be going and looking for a planter that's frame is extremely solid because I would be wanting to invest the money in the AG leader technology to really upgrade that planter and make it plant as good as these newer planters that come out nowadays so our operation is hypothetically a no-till situation so I would definitely want to put sure force down on this planter the hydraulic downforce make sure we can put that seed in the ground at a very consistent depth which will give us consistent emergence and consistency merges will give us high yield potential and high yield potential gives us up return in profit at the end the next thing I'd want to put on the planter is an electric drive I would want to put the sure drives onto the planter eliminate all the chains and everything along those lines give myself the ability to write prescriptions when I'm planting auto row shut off and turn compensation that's key which that's extremely especially in areas down here in southern Iowa we have different soil types throughout the fields some better than others we have terraces and we have point rows and things like that so we don't have good square fields so the auto shutoff SRIA ly gonna kick in and then on top of that we eliminate all the chains and sprockets that send vibrations through the meter so our meter performance will increase but really if we could if you guys were at the power show AG leader just released their new sure speed tube which is the high speed tube that you can plant up to ten miles an hour and it's an electric drive all-in-one replacement system that would be the ticket to be putting on this planner so now we've got our tractor and our planner we can get out there and we can put crops into the ground and at this point in time I think that that really gives you a good jumpstart into row crop because at this point you can hire about everything else done pretty easily you can go to a co-op higher your nutrients being placed and you can also hire them the spray and keep your weeds out of the field then you can find a neighbor that's willing to harvest your fields and you can do a custom rate and find a trucking company to take your crops to town so boom you're growing row crop but let's say you've still got some money that we can invest so let's expand that from two pieces of equipment to five pieces of equipment the next two pieces of equipment that I would purchase would actually not be a combine and let's pause on that and say why it would not be a combine combines are extremely expensive and you use them for a very short period of the year and for example say you're wanting to hire somebody to harvest your soybeans and the person you hire has a Mac dawn head or a Draper head week I call mac dawn heads but a Draper head before we switch to a Mac dawn head you hear everybody say oh you save three bushels or you save five bushels and you kind of were worrisome about that you didn't really know if it was true or not let me tell you I'm switching from a conventional auger style head to that Mac dawn head that we run now it saves you that yield the beans are not pinging off your windshield when they're dry and everything like that you do save that yield so simply by hiring somebody with a Mac dawn head you can basically pay for their custom rate by just having them run that head across your ground now corn on the other hands a little bit different story but the thing about corn is it takes a lot of labour to get your corn out you need a grain cart and you're gonna need a grain cart driver you're gonna need the combine run you're gonna need semis you're taking a lot of material out when you're hauling out corn so really the time savings you're gonna want to probably hire somebody because otherwise you're just gonna have a bunch of time in the world to get your crop out especially when it comes to the corn and if you're already hiring somebody to do your soybeans it doesn't really make sense to buy a combine just a new corner so what would I buy I would buy a semi truck and a grain trailer what semi truck in the grain trailer yep a semi truck in the grain trailer and here's why coming from personal experience during harvest time we're always looking for people to haul our grain so if you happen to have a semi truck and a grain trailer you could then hopefully talk with a neighbor and possibly trade them hauling their grain to town for them harvesting your crop plus that actually gives you the added benefit of being able to custom haul throughout the year bring crops the town to actually maybe make a little bit extra money so then you go looking for your semi truck and your grain tare trailer you use the same principles when we were looking for the tractor to do those things we won't go quite into depth on how we would do it but we'll just tell you what I would buy but obviously buy would be a big old 500 horsepower 300 inch wheelbase big old bull horns rolling cold Peterbilt with about 400 chicken lights running downside of the breaker breaker 1-9 just kidding what I would actually realistically more look for would be a semi truck along the terms of our high V Volvo truck yeah that's more of what I would look for fully depreciated semi that's mechanically sound with good tires and things like that your cost of ownership is pretty darn low you're not going to be going over the road very far so you can actually turn a profit on it and I would actually invest the money into a grain trailer because the grain trailers they typically hold their value really really well unless it's one of those steel things and then they rot out that's the whole purchase in price type of deal that we were talking about I don't want to deild trailer so what's the fifth piece of equipment this one's actually pretty good it'd be it'd be a sprayer so what type of sprayer well I like the self-propelled sprayers especially in our neck of the woods with all the curves and trailers and things like that I feel like you'd run over too much crop with a pull type sprayer so we're gonna throw the pull type sprayer out even though that would be the cheaper option is to go with the pull type sprayer I didn't want to go get it with a self-propelled sprayer what kind oh I guess it's no secret that I'm a huge Hagee fanboy I really like my Hagi's but for this instance I don't think that's what I go with because a Hagee's are still pretty darn expensive even the older ones and be it's the front boom the front boom it just wouldn't be good for this application obviously one of the things you could be doing with the sprayer is applying your nitrogen the problem with the front boom is if you apply the nitrogen it's gonna end up all over your sprayer and the one thing about the nitrogen is that it will absolutely eat absolutely everything it touches that's why if you watch any of Brian's farming videos when Bob's out there spraying he actually washes his sprayer every single night we don't have that capability to do that we can't wash our sprayer every single night unfortunately so really you would still have the front boom of the Hagee the rest of the hangy might start disappearing and for that reason that's why we go with the rear mount tube boom for this situation and then the other aspects that you can go with is your ability to cut the cost on your chemicals by buying direct because if you hire somebody to spray your fields they are gonna mark up those chemicals and the other issue is if you wanted to take on the risk of spraying others people's fields you could pick up a custom income that way but there we go guys that's the five piece of equipment that I would buy kind of on a budget you know without having a millions of dollars the purchase of equipment so thank you guys for hanging out with me again today if you guys are interested in these hats they are available on the website along with we just got these new stickers brought in here yesterday they are up there as well sent a few of them out already so thank you guys like I said hanging out with us I hope you guys enjoyed the style of video let me know in the comments section below what pieces of equipment you would choose on this type of budget we'll see you on the next one come on bandit you ready to go home all that equipment shopping sure makes you tired doesn't it

Channel: iowANFarmer

Views: 78,538

Keywords: Farming, Farming Video, John Deere, Bobcat, CNH, New holland, Farming vlog, millinial, millennial farmer, harvest vlog, harvest videos, john deere tractors, kubota, farm, young farmer, DIY, How to, how farms work, tractor shopping, buying a tractor, equipment shopping, farm equipment, how to get into farming, selling farm equipment, buying tactors, row crop farming, row crop tractors, tractor videos, farm vlog, for fun, funny, funny farmer

Id: _ehMycouh6M

Length: 20min 6sec (1206 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020