Raymond E. Massey
Historically, agriculture was composed of integrated activities where livestock producers were able to use manure on their cropland as a fertilizer. As farms began to specialize, livestock producers began raising more animals than they had land to efficiently utilize the crop nutrients in the manure. This has led to the decreased value of manure as a fertilizer. Sometimes, it is cheaper to dispose of manure than to use it.
Contributing to the devaluing of manure is the relatively low cost and high convenience of commercial fertilizers. Crop producers see little need to use manure as a soil fertilizer and enhancer. Livestock producers wanting neighbors to accept manure on their fields are met with little enthusiasm.
With increased attention to environmental impact and competition from commercial fertilizers, livestock producers must astutely market and use the manure by-product of livestock production. Critical to marketing manure is a better understanding of the costs of transporting and spreading manure.
Analyzer aids in manure marketing plans by helping determine the full cost of transporting and spreading manure on a single field or on all fields that will receive manure.
The full cost of transporting and spreading manure is determined by computing the cost of owning and operating the machinery necessary to accomplish these tasks. The spreadsheet input tables allow a producer to enter the equipment used and the production environment. This information is used to determine the number of hours devoted to manure transport and spreading. Total cost is a function of the per hour cost of owning and operating the power (e.g. tractor or truck) and the per acre cost of owning and operating the spreader (dry or liquid).
Analyzer does not consider the cost of storing manure. Storage of manure is a function of the facilities being used by the livestock producer. To change the storage facilities is a long term decision which will not directly impact the annual decisions of how many acres to spread the manure over or the selling price of the manure to neighboring crop producers. Whether manure is sold to a farmer across the road or 10 miles away has no immediate impact on the cost of storing manure.
When a livestock producer is faced with the decision of spreading manure the pertinent decision factors are how heavy to apply the manure, where to apply it and how much to charge for it.
Analyzer is a spreadsheet program requiring Microsoft Excel. To load the file, click on "file", then "open". Find the location of the file on your computer and highlight its name (Spreader.xlw) and then click "open".
Moving Around in Analyzer
When first loaded, the first sheet is the Introduction. It contains basic information about the program and its design. Other sheets in the program are where the actual work occurs. Probably on the bottom of the screen you will see several tabs. The titles are:
To get to a particular location in the spreadsheet click on the tab of the worksheet you want to see. The sheets entitled "Input" and "Fields" are the ones where user supplied information can be entered. The yellow colored cells are input cells which can be changed by the users. The white cells are computed using input supplied in the yellow cells. Blue cells repeat information supplied from the Input sheet.
Operation Procedures
Most of the input that users will enter into Analyzer are entered at the Input sheet. This sheet provides opportunity to enter financial and production information regarding the equipment used, the manure being spread and the land receiving the manure. Analyzer begins with data from a hypothetical situation.
Analyzer calculates the full economic cost of owning and operating the equipment necessary to spread manure. Costs are estimated from this input and equations published by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers1 and the American Agricultural Economics Association2 . The sheet entitled Machinery Costs reports the results of these calculations on a per hour basis for the power source and a per acre basis for the equipment.
Analyzer also estimates the number of hours manure distribution is expected to take given the parameters in the Manure Costs sheet. It then combines this information with the cost detail to estimate the total, the per acre and the per ton cost of distributing the manure. Time and cost estimates are reported in the sheet called Manure Costs.
The Input sheet only provides enough space to enter information for one field. It also requires that the user estimate the number of acres over which the equipment will be used (not just for the single field being modeled). It is advisable to go to the Fields sheet and enter all of the fields that will be receiving manure over the course of the year. This allows the program to get a better understanding of how many acres the spreader will cover and how many hours the tractor will run. The pertinent information regarding application time and cost is reported on a per field basis.
Analyzer is a computer decision aid and is provided solely on an "As Is" basis. The developer and the University of Missouri are not responsible for any decisions made as a result of this program.