Many of you have not finished harvesting this year’s crop. Thinking now about what you are going to plant next year is a very unusual situation. The market may be forcing us to take a hard look at what may be the most profitable.

Of course, the price you receive is only a part of which crop is going to make you the most profit. Knowing your input costs and how to manage them are a big part of farm profitability.

Barry Ward of the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Developmental Economics at Ohio State University has worked hard to bring some tools together to help you make some of the decisions you need to make before you can answer the question of what to plant.

OSU Extension’s Enterprise Budgets for 2006 have been updated and are online at http://aede.osu.edu/Pro grams/FarmManagement and click the Enterprise Budgets link.

They are in a spreadsheet format so you can change the budgets to put in your costs where you know them. When you don’t have a better number, you can leave Barry’s number in place.

Another new publication that may be helpful is the Ohio Farm Custom Rates - 2006; just click the publications button at the same address. The Ohio Cropland Values and Cash Rental Rates 2005-2006 are of interest to many.

It will not say, “the average cash rent in Butler County is,” but it does give you a lot of useful information about rents and land values. You can find this publication at http://aede.osu.edu/resources/pubs.htm and click on AED Economics Report Series.

If you don’t have access to the Internet, give us a call at 513-887-3722.

This farm news was published in the Nov. 15, 2006 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.