The past two years have been pretty tough on our farm.
Our 2024 and 2025 crops were the lowest yielding we have ever produced. After two disappointing years in a row, we’re optimistic that this year will not be a repeat.
Being optimistic is a must in this business, but it isn’t enough to make money. I spent some time this winter shopping around, researching alternative crops, trying to figure out the best way forward going into this 2026 growing season.
I spent some time talking to some farmers about growing grain sorghum. It seems that it would be a good fit for dry summers and in higher deer pressure areas. Those were the pros. The cons are harvesting it timely while still having corn and soybeans to harvest. The market for grain sorghum is also far from us.
One of the biggest drawbacks, though, is not having any history of growing this crop, which means that we need to take the county average for grain sorghum for crop insurance guarantees. Our county average was only 35 bushels an acre, making this a hard crop to cash-flow in the event of another bad year. After thinking this through, we decided it was not the right time to try something new.
The next place we looked at making changes was in our seed bill. In my opinion, seed companies have pushed us into purchasing traits that we may not always need, and the prices keep going up and up.
We bought about a third of the same varieties we are familiar with, but I purchased about two-thirds of our corn seed from an online seed company. A lot of their genetics have high drought tolerance, and I was able to purchase them with just the Roundup Ready traits I wanted. The best part: A bag of seed was about half the price of the seed we had been purchasing.
We plan on doing some side-by-side trials this year. Will it yield as high as the others? Maybe, maybe not. With fuel and fertilizer prices on the rise and commodity prices still flat, I think we now have a much higher chance of being profitable.
Being diversified has helped these past couple years. From our growing agritourism events, pumpkin sales and an addition of some livestock, things we had hoped would be extra have helped soften the blow from the bad cropping years.
With two bad growing seasons behind us, we are looking forward to this being a better year.
Here’s to straight rows, warm days, sunshine and timely rains for all of us.
