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Crop Shares: Additional Long term feature to consider adding #270

Open KelleyDrake opened 2 months ago

KelleyDrake commented 2 months ago

In each of the last 4 farms that I've helped install, the farmer had some ground under crop share arrangements. These typically have a 50%/50% deal where the landlord provides the land to the farmer for free and then reimburses 50% of certain specified direct costs and then the landlord receives 50% of the grain (which the landlord markets) and the farmer receives the other 50% of the grain which the farmer markets. There are variations of this approach. But that is the general gist.

I worked through the steps that would be required to implement this additional feature from a business perspective. I took the Brummell farm and added an extra 200 acres of corn to the base case in a 50/50 crop share and showed that in the scanned markup attached. It requires a few additional inputs and variables and changes to the presentation. And there are a couple of nuances like how much do we pay the landlord their share of ARC/PLC payments for example (which I have taken a simplifying approach).

This addition would not be a trivial exercise to code and to test. But since it keeps coming up again and again, I think it is something that we should consider doing over time. It does seem to be an issue for farmers and a deterrent for using the model -- and if the feature were available we could provide them with an easy answer to their questions.

The markup attached was my attempt to show how the business logic and user presentation might work flowing through each page of the inputs and outputs of the model. If we go after this challenge, it will make sense for us to discuss this and go through my suggestions first. It's possible that I'm not considering something that could be inadvertently impacted by the proposed changes. So a walk through together of the attached would be first step.

scan0086.pdf