Farm income by almost any calculation will be down from last year by nearly $19 billion. Most of this impact will be felt by the crops sector and will come in the form of higher input costs—costs that will not be offset by higher government payments.

This sharp downturn is the reason why AFBF has created this Farm Bureau Production Decision Aid (FB-PDA) Web site. Information provided on this site ranges from production budgets, which will help give you a base against which to peg your own costs; marketing information, which will point out that the lowest prices in 26 out of the last 30 years occurred at harvest time; and links to other Web sites that can aid in your decision-making process this spring.

Click on the commodity links at left to see the resources that apply to different commodities in different production regions of the country.

This one-stop Web site will provide links to some of the best farm management information we could locate. This will be a dynamic page, with updates occurring as quickly as they can be identified.

Because, ultimately, that’s what it gets down to: the quality of the decisions we make. We hope this information will help farmers make decisions that control their production costs and maintain their profitability in 2006.