AgTools for Managing Risk in Specialty Crops

This website is a resource for agricultural producers who manage the financial, marketing, production, and human resource risks associated with agriculture. Producers of high-valued crops often make large up-front investments in hopes of gaining sufficient returns in the future to cover their establishment costs and make a reasonable return on their investment. Producers who misjudge the costs and potential returns of such an investment may find themselves in serious financial difficulty. Global competition, labor costs, labor availability, and narrowing profit margins increase growers' risks when establishing and producing agricultural crops. Adequate compensation for these risks can come to those who have the needed information, develop cropping and marketing strategies, and perform sensitivity analyses on each of these strategies before implementing a decision. The following decision-making tools aim to help agricultural crop producers make better decisions to managing these risks.

A Grower's Agricultural Profitability Tool is a computer program designed to assist agricultural producers make long-run decisions when implementing technologies to a specific crop or cropping systems. Agricultural Profitability Tool estimates machinery, building, labor, and production input costs as well as fruit size, grade, and total yield for calculating returns for crops with multiple establishment and production years. The program allows the user to inflate specific return and input cost items over time to analyze the net present value, internal rate of return, and financial feasibility when implementing a particular technology, making minor changes to returns or input costs, or comparing cropping systems.making tools aim to help agricultural crop producers make better decisions to manage those risks.