Manitoba Agriculture has released its 2025 cost of production analysis for crops and Saskatchewan Agriculture has released its 2025 Crop Planning Guide. Both show limited profit potential in the year ahead. Both documents are available on-line.
In the Manitoba analysis, all 16 crops show a return over operating costs, but only pinto beans show a return over total costs. That return is small and pinto beans are minor acreage crop with only 111,000 acres in 2024.
Second place for 2025 profitability (smallest loss) goes to corn with oats in third place followed by canola, soybeans and hard red spring wheat. Average Manitoba yields are assumed with corn 140 bushels per acre, oats 120, canola at 45, soybeans at 40 and wheat at 65.
Target prices have corn at $5.75 a bushel, oats at $4.10, canola at $13.25, soybeans at $12.00 and hard red spring wheat at $8.00.
Saskatchewan uses a high yield scenario at the 80th percentile of average yields in each soil zone and the inputs required to achieve that high yield. Each crop also has an average yield scenario. Lentils and green peas are about the only significant acreage crops showing any profit potential at average yields. Most crops have trouble covering both variable and fixed costs even at high yields.
Some crops in the Saskatchewan analysis are real dogs including feed barley, malting barley, all types of mustard, soybeans and even hard red spring wheat.
As producers, we tend to fixate on operating costs with fertilizer, seed and crop protection being the biggest ticket items. Operating costs for 2025 are down marginally from last year, but crop prices have dropped even more. A farm can’t usually reduce variable costs to any large extent without also cutting yield potential.
The biggest variation from one farm to another comes in fixed costs for land and machinery. Both Manitoba and Saskatchewan Agriculture make an assumption about land and machinery owned versus financed. Depreciation and opportunity cost are estimated. Producers with limited debt and who aren’t renting a lot of land will typically have much lower fixed costs.
Estimating crop prices eight months in advance and making yield assumptions doesn’t really tell you how the year is going to turn out. No one can see the future. However, it’s still useful to crunch the numbers. While the analysis by the agriculture departments is a good starting point, it’s even more instructive to use this as a template to insert your own numbers and assumptions.
Personally, I like to start with the crop insurance yield guarantee which is 80 per cent of my average yield (70 per cent in the case of chickpeas). This becomes the worst-case scenario.
Detailed crop insurance information for 2025 isn’t yet available, but yield guarantees don’t change dramatically from one year to the next and crop price assumptions are likely to be close to the prices assumed by the provincial agriculture departments.
Overall, any way you look at it, the picture is much less optimistic than what the crop sector has enjoyed over recent years.