JACKSONVILLE, Ill. – A financial survey of over 2,000 Illinois farms showed that on average 2025 was a slightly stronger financial year than 2024 due to higher incomes. However, the University of Illinois farmdoc report, “Illinois Farm Financial Trends in 2025: Summary and Analysis,” found that after three years of lower incomes on grain farms, working cash had decreased almost 40 percent from 2022 to 2020 levels on the average farm.

“With projected continued lower incomes for the rest of 2026 and 2027, farmers will need to find ways to reduce costs while making efficient use of assets. Careful monitoring of these measures is essential in an environment of tighter margins to help make sound farm financial decisions for your operation,” urged study author Bradley Zwilling, of Illinois Farm Business Farm Management (FBFM) and the U of I Department of ACES.

Morgan County and Iroquois County, Ill., farmer Evan Marr, who represents his district’s corn farmers as a board member of the Illinois Corn Growers Association (ICGA), is taking Zwilling’s financial advice to heart and putting it out in the field. As a member and proponent of Precision Conservation Management (PCM), Marr spoke to Farm World about best management practices for farm inputs such as fertilizers that save money and still deliver top-quality corn yields.

“We definitely have seen a decline in working capital over the last several years. We’re talking about fertilizer costs that have in some cases tripled, and haven’t backed off,” Marr said. “While we have had some decent-yielding harvests, it’s been very difficult playing catch-up in what seems like a cat-and-mouse game.”

Marr is a proponent of band placement, a method of applying dry fertilizers in a concentrated band near the seed or in the rhizosphere soil. This is more cost-efficient than traditional broadcasting and can enhance crop yields, according to the Jacksonville-area farmer.

“We’ve always kind of considered ourselves a strip-till and minimum-till operation, so we’ve always had a little bit of a mix of very light vertical tillage in some areas on our corn and then no-tilling into the spring. We’ve gone so far as to band fertilizers on our 30-inch row beans and to strip-till those as well,” Marr said.

“We have in a sense converted our operation to a two-pass system. We built one strip bar that strictly does the dry fertilizer. We’re placing that at around 6-to-7 inches deep. There is another strip bar that comes in behind that in the same exact path that puts on our anhydrous ammonia. Some ask why we don’t do it all in one pass, but it may be too warm to put on liquid anhydrous at the same time in the fall. If we would be paying a custom applicator to go out and broadcast it, we are doing it for essentially the same cost or less and it makes our anhydrous seal a lot better in the fall.”

The techniques he described have allowed Marr to maintain fertility on his farm while still producing profitable harvests, he added. With a diminished 2026 corn harvest in the books at his family’s two grain farms (their corn yield was down around 20 percent), Marr said he’s still “sitting pretty good for the most part” in regard to his per-acre profit ratio.

Fall cover crops, which can save farmers money by greatly reducing field nutrient runoff, have also been a part of Marr’s input conservation plan. “Sometimes it is difficult for us to get those on in the fall in a timely fashion,” Marr conceded. “They still have their place in a lot of areas. And when you look at some of the inputs we use beyond the fertilizers, as far as chemistry we try to work with the (pesticide-fungicide retailer) we’ve worked with for a long time to cut some of that cost down per acre as well.

“With as expensive as they’ve gotten, there’s always an alternative avenue to utilize a cheaper product or source. It may not provide quite the same residual effect that you’re getting, but may represent the best bang for the buck.”

Marr said he saves money on diesel fuel, an input which has more than doubled in price since the 2026 planting season began, through his reduced tillage practices. Farmers seeking guidance in reducing their costs while making optimal use of their assets should look into joining the legion of farmers enrolled in PCM, he urged.

“Utilizing the PCM program since it was started (in 2015 by the ICGA), we’ve been able to compare and utilize our farm data to see the things we’re doing right and the things we’re possibly doing wrong and need to improve on. We try not to go in too extreme on anything, but we like to keep new ideas flourishing within our operation to where we can set ourselves up to improve or make our farm more efficient in our practices,” Marr said.

The FBFM- U of I financial survey was conducted using key farm solvency characteristics identified by the Farm Financial Standards Council to analyze the financial strength of a farm business. Using these markers, data utilized for the survey included the reported liquidity, solvency, profitability and financial efficiency of 2,018 Illinois farms enrolled in Illinois FBFM. Grain farms made up the large majority (1,942 farms) of the dataset, which also included 12 hog farms, 27 dairy farms, and 38 beef farms.

The report can be read in its entirety at farmdocdaily.illinois.edu. 

Farmers can find out more about PCM and enroll at precisionconservation.org.