Youngfarmwife - 12/1/2024 08:45

My husband and I have been married 7 years now. We both have off farm jobs. I grew up in rural farming community but never was exposed to the financial end of things. Now that I’m married to a farmer I’m trying to figure that out but has lead to several arguments. Mostly to my lack of understanding cattle ag finance. We have a feed lot of about 130 cows and farm 350 acres of row crop that we rent. We currently do not live off any income from the farm.

I have asked my husband to show and explain to me how much we profit from the farm and he can’t do that. He says that it’s very hard to pinpoint what you make in a year because you are always buying inputs for next year in the current year, there’s cows we bought last year that won’t be sold until this year. There’s corn from our fields feeding the cattle coming from the bin that could have been sold etc (how can you put a price on that when the market changes everyday?. We might buy 5 cows one day, 15 a month later etc that would all have different break evens. He says spreading out equipment and fuel properly across crop and cattle is complicated too so he does not know. I do understand that there seems to be many factors involved and not easy to keep track of. I’ve randomly asked how much money we have in the farm account before and he will say a number and then will follow that up with, but we have to buy calves soon etc. So to me it feels like we never have any money from the farm?

It has lead to a lot of frustration. He has a goal of not having to work in town. Which I want to be fully supportive of but I want to know how much we make from the farm to know what is feasible and what’s not. How can you have a business if you don’t know what you make? Do you just run an average across everything? I would really like some insight on how you manage it all. Maybe the answer is he is right it is too complicated and I need to just not worry about it? Thank you for reading and any advice back.

EDIT: Based off some responses I must be making my husband sound irresponsible and I don’t think that’s the case. We do have a separate account specifically for the farm only. We do prepay expenses. We have an operating note that we utilize sometimes, other times it’s paid down and it’s not touched. He does *not* just show up to our tax appointment with a wad of receipts….lol. It sounds like we need to look into managerial accounting and not just tax accounting; from these responses that will help me understand it all better and give me an idea of what we could potentially plan to live off of. Really appreciate all the feedback.