 So today I'm going to be talking about budgeting for strawberry production. My name is Jessie Rowan, I'm on the farm and agribusiness team as well as the commercial horticulture team. So I work primarily with fruit and vegetable growers in the central part of the state. And so today I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk about the budget that we have available online through the extension website, and then I'm going to kind of break it down by the different input costs within that budget and the different input costs related to strawberry production. And then I'm going to touch on how you can budget for your farm, for your own farm. All right, so to start with the budget we have online. It looks a lot like this. This is that first summary page, and it's actually, it's from 2019. We're in the process of getting an updated version put online, but if you can't tell a lot of things have changed in the past two years, a lot of prices have gone up, but this budget still really provides a good list, a good summary of the expected cost, just the expected expenses you would have on one acre of strawberries. One of the assumptions within this enterprise budget that's already online are that we use six foot spacing, that all these strawberries are sold for the fresh market, that plastic mulch is used. And within this budget, they also account for full harvest labor. It's not a you pick operation. This is if you were to hire crop workers to harvest your entire crop of strawberries. And also in this budget, they account for cover crops, which is great. That's something that Chip really loves to speak on and he could touch on it more if anyone had questions about it. But also within this budget that's online already. So the first page of it is an, is that summary that I just showed you on the first page. The second, third and fourth page, it kind of it lists out the field operations. And it looks a little intimidating if you're looking at this and you see a lot of numbers and a lot of decimals. But really it's really good to look at to see the operation, you know, what activity you might be doing like a soil test, you know, applying fertilizer, applying lime or planting your cover crops. And it also shows you in what month you could do that. And this, there's a little given tape for, you know, people growing strawberries in North or South Alabama, but it's a really good guy, a good estimate to look at to kind of just show you the activities when you can expect to do them. And kind of in the order of which you should do things like they have soil tests and then later on in the season, I think it's in March they have, they want you to do a plant tissue sample. So it really just gives you the optimal optimal time in which to do these activities. And it also gives a good estimate of about how many harvest hours you could expect, you know, a lot of labor hour estimates that are really, that would be really beneficial to someone planning on starting a strawberry operation. So I wanted to talk next about the input cost. So since this budget is made, since this from 2019, you would expect a lot of things have gone up since then, you know, COVID has occurred since then, and then all the supply chain issues that occurred then and have still kind of hung around some. So that's going to be things like fertilizer, that's going to be something that you can look at this budget, you can look at this budget summary, but know that the prices are going to be a lot higher for things like fertilizer, chemicals, plants, labor and fuel. I mean, you can look at the price of diesel fuel in this 2019 budget and see there's 270 a gallon. That's not where we're at today as lovely as that would be. And you can also see they accounted for $11 an hour for a lot of their labor. That's it's really, it's really going to be tough to come by any labor nowadays where you're paying them $11 an hour. And then some of the obvious things are like fertilizer, chemicals and plants. Those have gone up over the past couple years, especially fertilizer and chemicals have gone up with the fuel, fuel costs increases. Just as energy goes up in price, those are going to correlate right along with it. I went back a couple of slides. So first, I'm going to talk about fertilizer. It's right on the nose. Everyone knows that the price of fertilizer has gone up drastically in the past couple years. So in that older budget, they estimated that you'd spend about six hundred and sixty five dollars on an acre of strawberries. That's no longer the case. I can't give exact numbers for y'all today because that's going to depend on your soil tests and, you know, what kind of fertilizer, what you need for your farm, what you need for your land. But the USDA economic research service, they estimated, and this is just around nitrogen fertilizers, but they estimated that all three kinds of nitrogen fertilizer are going to go up, you know, over 100 percent. You can see in this graph, this graph is just showing how your process has changed over the past two years. So you see that purple line is 20, 20, you know, pretty steady, a little up and down, but pretty, pretty daggers steady. The green line, 20, 21, you see around September that in the last quarter of last year, it skyrocketed. And then you see the red line is 20, 22 continues to go up. It starts at nine hundred and twenty dollars an acre. I mean, nine hundred and twenty dollars a ton for your area. And then you can see it's just angling up. So it's really, it's just going to get higher. And that's really just something to take into consideration when you're planning for your strawberry operation or really any kind of operation. And something that Extension really encourages is testing your soil. That way you're accurately applying the correct amount of fertilizer. You're not spending money on fertilizer that you don't need. That's not going to be absorbed well in your soil. And so a soil sample, that is really just going to give you a really good idea of what you need to put in your soil. And also a couple of times a year with a strawberry operation, you can have a tissue sample sent off and test for the nutrients in that exact tissue sample. So the cost for a soil sample is around seven dollars. That's pretty inexpensive to me to know exactly what my land needs. And especially as the prices of fertilizer just continue to go up, paying seven dollars to know exactly what you need to spend on fertilizer is a pretty good deal. That way you're not spending money on extra fertilizer that you're not going to need. So really, this just kind of goes to show that when you're trying to budget for any kind of fruit or vegetable production, you know, and prices are going up in all these different input sections. The more accurate and the more tailored you can make those costs to your farm, the better, the more efficient you can be, the better. Because really at the end of the day, that's all you can do. You can control what you can control. You can't control the fertilizer prices. You can't make them go down. Can't make the price of fuel go down. But all you can do is use just what you need, not spending money on things you don't need and just having as efficiently run operation as you can. And I also just wanted to throw in that you can spend anywhere between ten or eighty dollars for a tissue sample. And that can give you a really good idea of the nutrients your plants themselves are taking up. So the next thing I wanted to touch on the next input cost that's gone up has been labor. And this graph, you don't have to look at all the numbers per se, but really just focusing on the fact that that green line is the number of crop workers that have been. Oh, sorry. The green line is the dollars per hour that those that crop workers are being paid. You can see it in 2015. It was pretty low. It was around eleven dollars an hour at the tail end of twenty twenty one. The wage for those workers was around fifteen dollars an hour. You can look at that blue line. That just shows the number of workers has stayed pretty steady. It dips down. And this is really related to fruit and vegetable production. So the number of crop workers is going to get down around January, December of every year, because that's just when we don't have as many crop workers in the U.S. A lot of them come through on a program that's around ten months long. So they may go back to their home for a couple of months a year. But the top of those peaks, that's going to show that's a really good representation of the number of crop workers just hired in the U.S. And you can see the top of those peaks has stayed pretty steady. It goes it goes across pretty well. It was a little lower in twenty twenty because covid threw off everything. But you can see that the number of workers has stayed pretty steady. Yet the price that we're paying those workers continues to go up. It does not get down much just steadily increasing. And another just another segment of that budget that has increased along with everything else broke over. This may not be as drastic of a price increase as some of the other objects that was priced around a thousand dollars a roll in twenty nineteen. I've looked up similar rolls in twenty twenty two. I've seen some for around twelve hundred fourteen hundred. And you have that initial investment, but it is something that you can reuse. So it's not something that you might have to buy every year or a couple times a year at something you can get a lot of uses out of. But also something specific to strawberry production. So you have a lot of labor involved in using a row cover. And a row cover is necessary in strawberry production. Whenever it gets below freezing temperatures, you have to cover up the strawberry so they're not damaged by any of the frost or any of the cold temperatures. And so it's really important to have labor. Even if you were to have a you pick operation and you didn't have a hired crew of people to pick your crops, you still need to have enough people to lay this row cover over your strawberries and you're going to need to access to that crew at really specific at really key time. So it's not something that's labor intensive all the time, but around January and February, it's going to be really labor intensive. At key times and it's going to be really important that you have enough labor to put that over your crops in a timely manner. Another thing that I can't I can't skim over this when I talk about strawberry production, something that I've heard from growers from colleagues is that you cannot spare fungicides. That's something we really don't want you to skimp on anything. You don't need to skimp on IPM or fungicides, but I've been told that especially fungicides are something that's really important in strawberry production in keeping those berries and keeping those plants healthy looking. So it's something that's really crucial to the operation. So chemical prices have gone up over the past couple years. Just as some of these supply chain issues continue. And so a piece of advice I usually give farmers if they're worried about the price of some of their chemicals going up, or even sometimes of a certain chemical being available when they need it. I just tell them to buy it when they can, even if it's January. And it's something that you don't need for four months. If you sit at the store and you know you're going to use it, you know you're going to need it. Go ahead and buy it because you don't necessarily want to rely on this supply chain, you know all these chemicals that are imported, you don't want to have to rely on that and then not be able to get something when you need it. And also, so rotation of strawberries is important. It's something I know that not every farm does this, but if sufficient land is available, it's something that can really benefit you. And so before going into a strawberry growing operation, this is really something that you would like to have planned out. A lot of people, they like to leave your land without strawberries for a couple of years, but some people just rotate every other year. But just some kind of rotation is really beneficial to kind of relieve some of that disease pressure, insect pressure, and it can lead to better productivity. I mean there are ways to still increase your productivity if you can't rotate, but it's just something that's generally encouraged. And also plastic culture. This is another part of strawberry production that is an investment every year. So just the capital investment in the plastic mulch, you know, the labor investment of shaping the beds, laying it down. That's something that's really, it's really just going to be a cost you need to be prepared for, have it planned in your budget. So I've got the prices for a couple of years ago that may not help you now, and I know there's so many different places you can get. Plastic culture, I've seen some online. I've seen some 2,400 foot rolls. I think it was four foot wide for around $130 that I've used in some other budgets when I'm including the price of plastic mulch. But also some farmers will plant another crop into that plastic mulch after the strawberries to kind of just spread the cost of it onto another crop. Anytime you can do that, it's just instead of attributing the whole cost of this plastic mulch to strawberries, you can spread it over strawberries or onions, strawberries, and whatever the other crop may be, it just kind of spreads out that investment of something that it's not something that can be reused the next year. It's something that's just good for one year. All right. And so the cost of plants, that's going to be your biggest investment. I believe when it comes to strawberry production, that's something. So I have a range on here listed. I've seen them this year for around $0.45 to $0.50 a plant. I've seen them lower than that, seen them around $0.30, $0.35 per plant. But that's really just to show that in the older budget from 2019, I think they were selling for, I think it was $0.24 or $0.23 per plant, and just to show that in some places, the price of plants have doubled. And these are something that's typically purchased locally. If you want to get organic plugs, that usually is done. They usually have to be brought in from somewhere outside of Alabama. And so you're going to be planting, I did a little math on here, not to scare anyone. But so if you're planting around 1,400 plugs per acre, I mean, 14,000 plugs per acre, and say they're $0.50 each, you're spending around $7,000 just on your plants. That is just a huge investment in terms of money spent on plants. I can't think of a whole lot of other fruit and vegetable production where you're spending that kind of money on just the plant itself, just the plug. So that's really, it's a major investment that you really need to, I say to plant around it, but this would kind of be the basis of your plan. And you would need to plan everything else around this to make sure that you're managing everything as well as you can to take care of these plants that are your major investment. And so another thing that is a really, a really big cost in strawberry production would be labor. So nobody's denying that strawberry, strawberry production is a really, it's a crop that demands a lot of investment, initial investment. So we covered the investment of the plants and you know, and then everything else that goes along with that production system. But also you have a lot of labor involved in pre-harvest and can have a lot of labor in the post-harvest section of your farm. So pre-harvest, you're going to have, you know, land prep, like you do with anything. Planting is going to be pretty labor intensive because you have to have someone personally putting each plug into those holes. I guess you could have a planner, but it's typically done by hand. Scouting, spraying, other management involved. So irrigation would fall under that, scouting for pests, scouting for diseases. Just anything involved in the management, that's going to be a lot of labor involved. And then also, like I mentioned previously, frost protection. So having, you're just having those periods of time where you have to get a crew of people to roll out these row covers and put sandbags or put anything down, you know, to hold it in place. There's going to be a good bit of labor in that. And I mean, that can change year to year depending on how many freezes you have and how many you have late into the year that could really damage your plants. But that's just, it's labor. It can't be overlooked that you're going to need to have labor accounted for, you know, all of these tasks. And post-harvest, you can or you cannot have a lot of labor yourself in the operation. So like in the budget I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, they accounted for harvest labor. And I think they accounted for it was about 30 hours a week harvesting. Yeah, 30 hours per week in the months of April and May. And so that can kind of be gone around if you were to have a U-pick operation. It can't go around it completely because even with a U-pick operation, you're going to need, you're going to want to have some of them pick or at least gleaned after by some of the people on your farm. A lot of U-pick operations will offer U-pick and then also some pre-picked buckets. So it's not like you can depend just on consumers to come out there and pick the berries for themselves, but that can decrease, that can take away so much of the labor that you need if you were to have a U-pick operation. And that can actually, I mean, that can save you money, you know, save you from hiring more people to harvest all those berries because, you know, they're time sensitive. Berries don't have a super long shelf life. It's something they need to be picked when they need to be picked. And it's a lot of intense production in April and May. And so, you know, having a U-pick operation just can save you a lot of money on hiring a, you know, a harvesting crew, but you're still going to need some labor to glean, you know, to offer some pre-picked buckets most likely, and then to clean up acrobatics. That's just something that can't be avoided. And so this next slide, I took a little inspiration from Chip East. Chip's always talking about people, farmers getting the retail dollar, and that's really, that's how you can get the most bang for your buck as a strawberry producer. So the retail prices are going to be higher than process or wholesale prices. That's kind of a given that's usually the case in a lot and a lot of fruits. You know, if you're selling direct to the consumer, you can charge a higher price. And they can also be used for value-added products. If you were to have something that didn't sell, which I don't often hear, I hear about a lot of strawberry farmers selling out, or at least that's how it's been the past couple weeks. But if you had some, or if you just wanted to use some for a value-added product to sell later in the year, or to sell alongside your fresh strawberries, that's something they could be used for. And like I mentioned before, a U-pick operation that can save on harvest labor, and it can also save on marketing costs. Because if you were to have a U-pick operation, consumers are driving to your farm. They're picking the berries, they're paying for that gallon that buck did, however much a strawberry is, and then they're leaving. And while you have, you know, something extra for that would be, you know, you have extra people on your farm that you wouldn't normally have, but you're also, from the farmer's point of view, you're not having to go out and drive to a farmer's market. You're not having to drive to a store and deliver your berries. You're not really having to go much of anywhere. I mean, you're still probably going to spend some money on signs, maybe some advertisements, but you could save a lot on marketing costs, as well as harvest labor. So that's just something to consider, especially if you want to have a strawberry operation. And you know that you can't, you don't have access to as much labor as you would need to harvest them all. That's just a direction you could turn your operation in and save money on a couple of things. And so I'm going to skip the next slide just because I'm a little short on time, and I wanted to talk about how you can budget for your farm. And so this screenshot that I have up here right now, that's how most of our horticultural budgets typically look. The ones that we've gone through and redone, they all look like this. And this isn't all of it. I just took a grab of, you know, the top half of it so that you can see how it's laid out. But you have receipts at the top, you have all your variable costs, and then below this you would have your fixed costs listed. And so we should have a strawberry budget out like this in a couple months or so. But it's something, if you were to already have operation, you wouldn't even necessarily have to have this to keep track or to keep a budget for your farm. You could keep track of it in a similar manner on your farm computer. And so this one's set up because the two columns in blue you can change. You can change the numbers, change the quantity, the cost per unit of certain items, and then get a different cost per acre. But if you were to do this on your own farm, you could keep track of, so I would start out, I would keep track of the strawberries you sell, either you pick. It would be helpful to keep track of how many you sell, that are actually you pick and how many sell that are pre-picked focused that way. You know, you can just keep an eye on how consumers are buying. And then you can list all of your own costs under this. But something like this, these budgets that we provide online, they provide you a good list of your variable costs and what you should be keeping track of. Some of them are even listed at zero, they're listed on there just so you can go through yourself and say, like a land rent. If you're not renting the land, then you could just leave that zero across that whole line. But if you are renting the land, that's where you would need to input that cost. But it's really helpful just to provide a list of what you need to create a budget. But you can do this yourself for your own form by keeping track of just how much you spend on soil tests, your plants, you know, any other tests you may do like a soil, like a tissue analysis, and then how much you spend on fertilizer line. Especially if someone, if you were to keep track of it this year, you can look at it next year, see if things have gone up, or if they've gone back down, or if things have gotten even crazier. But it's just, it's really good to keep track of these kind of things. You can look at them year after year. Really the enterprise budget is really beneficial for someone planning. The one that we have online is really good for someone planning to get into strawberry production. But if you already have a farm, if you start it and then a couple years into it, it's really going to help you to keep this budget, to keep this type of budget for your own operation. The numbers that we put in it are all estimates, because every farm is different. Every farmer is different. Everyone has different assets, different strengths, and just different costs. Some farmer may need a ton of fertilizer, may need to amend their soil so much, say it's been empty for a few years, and they're having completely amended from scratch. And to say someone has landed, they have taken care of and amended for five or 10 years. Your costs are just going to be different based on your land, the farmer himself and his management practices, and having to also go about things. But keeping track of those things can really help you budget for the next year. And that's essentially what you want to do. You want to keep track of your expenses year after year, and then use them when you're planning for the next year. And really, it can help you notice changes year to year, noticing trends, and it helps you better plan out your expenses for the following year. And that's what we all want. We all want to have a better idea of what we're going to spend, so we can have a better idea of what we can earn from it. All right, that's the end of my presentation. I hope I didn't go too long, but I have my contact information listed up here. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Feel free to reach out to me.