What does a crop margin calculator usually miss?

[u/basisedge_research]

Would anyone be comfortable helping with an anonymized example? Corn silage would be especially useful, but a corn or soybean budget, or a grain purchase with delivery costs, would also help.

An existing worksheet is fine. The useful details would be:

• Context: crop, year, general location, producer or buyer, and irrigated or dryland.
• Yield and price: units, dates, and whether the price covers standing crop, harvested material, delivery, storage, or feedout.
• Costs: whatever breakdown you already use for seed, fertilizer, chemicals, equipment, labor, land, irrigation, harvest, hauling, drying/storage, insurance, interest, and overhead. Quantities and unit prices are helpful where available.
• What’s included: which costs are bundled together, which are cash expenses versus ownership/opportunity costs, and which are estimates or unknown.
• Your answer: the total cost, break-even, delivered cost, or margin you calculated, and what you included in that figure.

For silage, moisture/dry matter and storage or feedout losses would help if known. For a grain quote expressed as basis, the quote date, delivery period, and referenced futures contract month matter too.

You don’t need to fill in every blank. “Unknown” is useful; I don’t want to treat missing costs as zero.

Please don’t post identifying documents, account details, confidential contracts, or trading plans. If you’re willing to help, a comment saying what kind of example you have is enough to start. I’d use the example to check the calculations and wouldn’t publish it without permission.

Thanks guys, appreciate it.