FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE OF SELECTED GRASS-BASED FARMING SYSTEMS IN THE NORTHERN TALLGRASS PRAIRIE REGION

We develop a series of new grass-based budgets for use in FINPACK, a standard farm finance analysis tool. The new budgets are then applied to an evaluation of plausible grass-based systems on three farms in the Northern Tallgrass Prairie region of Minnesota and North Dakota. The farms are used for illustration purposes only. We find no grass-based alternative that financially outperforms current non-grass operations. Nor do any score particularly well under a lender credit rating process that we adapted for this study. Our results suggest caution before one accepts claims that grass-based systems are uniformly feasible and financially desirable. There undoubtedly are individual situations in which such alternatives make financial sense, but their use may have to be accompanied by income supplements from external sources in order to further wide-spread adoption." (p.3)