Findings from twenty years of working with custom harvesters

Making money in the custom harvesting business is not as simple as knowing your costs and charging slightly more to garner a profit. If your costs are especially high for the services you provide, the cost-plus-markup process will mean you don’t get jobs – you’ve priced yourself out of the market. If your costs are especially low, you don’t maximize profit as you leave money on the table – you could be charging more. Rather, long-run profitability is about being a low-cost operator for the services you render in terms of $/acre, $/hour, or $/bushel. But, to do that you need to know your costs relative to others, especially for specific categories, so that you can focus your efforts to continually improve management. Over the past twenty years, we have worked extensively with dozens of (grain) custom harvesters helping them economically analyze and benchmark their operations. In this session, we will present the results across the twenty year time period identifying trends and factors that help make some years and some harvesters more profitable than others. Statistics will be presented helping audience members understand the characteristics and uniqueness of the custom harvesting industry.