MSU Extension Farm Management

Keeping current on farm machine work rates is the focus of the 2021 Machine Custom and Work Rate Estimates report. In today’s production agriculture business, many farms reach out to other farms to help fill the gap of maintaining efficient machine operations.

This report covers a wide number of the basic field machine operations providing a summary of custom machine rates that farms have reported they charged each other during the prior year in the Midwest region. In addition, the report provides a summary of calculated estimates of farm machine activity costs, which provides the average estimate of what it costs a farm to operate a farm machine doing different tasks in the production system.

Farms use this report as a base from which they can determine what could be a fair exchange value for both the provider and recipient of some custom machine work on their farms. In most cases some adjustments are made as the price of fuel changes and for the size or efficiency of the machine work done. It is common for small jobs to have a 20% to 30% higher cost of operation than a larger job that allows the operator to reach the suggested average operations cost.

Updated 8-27-2021:

A calculation error was found in some of the averages.  If you have downloaded a copy of the worksheet prior to 8-27-2021, please re-download with the corrected values.