By Greg LaBarge, Ohio State University

Putting pencil to paper (or keyboard to spreadsheet) to fine-tune your crop budgets remains a priority for the 2026 cropping year. Lower commodity prices and stubbornly high or even increasing input prices provide a challenging economic outlook once again for next year. The 2026 Ohio Crop budgets provide a place to start the planning process. In these budgets, the top variable cost items for corn are seed, nitrogen, hauling, phosphorus, and herbicide. For soybeans, the top costs are seed, herbicide, phosphorus, and potassium.

With seed cost as the big ticket item for both crops, let’s start there. Start with the yield potential when selecting hybrids or varieties. In performance trials, the separation between the highest and lowest yielding varietie

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