Progress 09/01/24 to 08/31/25

Outputs
Target Audience:The primary goal of this project is to provide a national farm financial benchmarking database that will allow any farmer in the nation to compare their financial performance with a selected peer group of like farms. Therefore, the target audience of this project is all farmers in the U.S. The more direct audience is that group of farmers who participate in farm business management education programs and contribute to the National Farm Financial Management and Benchmarking Database. All farms across the country have access to the FINBIN website, the portal into the national database to generate benchmark reports. They can also use the "Compare Your Farm" feature to enter their financial data and generate peer group benchmarks. A third audience is agricultural lenders, educators, and other agricultural professionals and policymakers who can access FINBIN to generate reports to benchmark their clients; generate educational material; and monitor the performance of the ag economy. Finally, the fourth audience is agricultural researchers who can use FINBIN reports to support research in various facets of farm financial management. A more focused effort on research has taken place over recent years with the addition of Dr. Joleen Hadrich and Dr. Nicholas Gallagher as University of Minnesota faculty members. Dr. Hadrich has moved into an administrative role; therefore, a more concerted effort on research collaboration is ongoing with Dr. Gallagher. The University of Minnesota Applied Economics Department also has a current search for an additional faculty member in farm financial management. The goal will be to collaborate with both of these departmental faculty members on research and publications. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Consistently, CFFM provides extensive training and resources to partner programs and groups that submit data to the National Farm Business Management Benchmarking Database. These resources and training help ensure the database contains accurate information and conforms to a standard of consistency and integrity. Both virtual and in-person training sessions are regularly conducted during the time period of this project. Virtual training sessions have proved to be invaluable as they allow a greater number of program educators to participate in a convenient and cost-effective manner. All virtual training webinars are recorded and made easily accessible for educators to reference or view at a later point in time. In the spring, CFFM hosted a recorded webinar dedicated to training newer educators and educators from emerging programs on the use of our RankEm software. Educators from several partner programs were in attendance at this webinar. The RankEm software program is used by participating programs for auditing and aggregating individual farm data before the data is sent to the CFFM team for review prior to submission to FINBIN. This software also enables program leaders to generate informational reports that they often use in their respective annual summary data reports and presentations. Lastly, RankEm provides benchmark reports for individual producers, which allow them to compare their farm financial and enterprise performance to their peers. This provides a powerful means for SWOT analysis by producers. In August, CFFM annually hosts an in-person FINPACK training session specifically geared for educational and benchmarking users. Educators from Minnesota and North Dakota were in attendance this past year. Throughout the program effort, CFFM staff have traveled as requested to provide training for farm management programs. During this project time period, training has been provided to educators and consultants in Minnesota and North Dakota. These sessions are often for newer instructors but also provide necessary updates, resources, and education to all program team members. Additionally, CFFM staff presented at the National Farm Management Conference on ratio analysis and how this can help instructors in their work with farmers. In November, CFFM hosts the annual Benchmark Project Leaders Meeting, which brings together all of the partner programs in person to discuss the successes and challenges they've experienced, how CFFM can best support their educational efforts, and to provide any updates on changes to the FINPACK software or the analysis procedures. This meeting enables the projects to connect with and learn from each other. Last December, CFFM hosted its annual webinar training series covering several topics to aid participating educators in their annual analysis work with producers. These topics included completing whole-farm and crop/livestock enterprise analysis, completing market channel analysis, analyzing fields using cover crop practices, tips for resolving analysis errors and data discrepancies, and important updates for the upcoming analysis season. The webinars are provided live via Zoom, and educators can access the recordings after the fact to reference while completing a farm analysis with a producer. Recently hired educators and those still gaining foundational experience, as well as those from emerging and new benchmarking programs, are the target audience of this webinar series. Beyond delivering training sessions, CFFM provides an array of resources for its educational program partners. A Google Site (https://z.umn.edu/benchmarking) is maintained by CFFM, containing resources, including the annually updated Closeout Manual (serves as a guide for the standard analysis procedure and for handling unique, uncommon, or currently relevant situations) and the recordings of all the virtual training webinars conducted. Additional resources have been created this past reporting period to assist new programs in understanding the FINBIN contribution process and database threshold expectations for the national database. Resources contributed by farm management programs are also housed on this site, providing a repository of resources for all collaborators. The FINPACK Knowledge Base (https://www.cffm.umn.edu/finpackkb/) is another CFFM website providing resources for educational users of the FINPACK software with a series of whitepapers and analysis completion resources. Information found here includes FINPACK analysis input forms, whitepapers explaining how to correct analysis discrepancies, and other beneficial tips and resources to aid in the use of FINPACK. Lastly, CFFM maintains a full suite of online training videos for FINPACK, where users can watch numerous short videos explaining very specific components of data entry or output interpretation for FINPACK analysis tools. CFFM also added a "FINBIN Made Easy" section to the FINBIN homepage. This includes videos for all users on how to use FINBIN to run the reports desired by the user. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Information from the National Farm Business Management Benchmarking Database is primarily disseminated through public access to the FINBIN website. Anyone is able to search or query the FINBIN database for summary or benchmark-level information on an array of financial metrics. These queries can be filtered by geography, farm sizes (using ranges of gross revenue, net farm income, or total enterprise size, for example), farm type, and many other whole farm attributes. For crop or livestock enterprise data queries, filters are available for enterprise size, profitability levels, cost of production, and specific production practices. CFFM, as well as the partner programs, produce annual reports intended to disseminate benchmarking information to producers and other stakeholders. Each May, CFFM produces the Annual Report on Minnesota Farm Finances, where information from Minnesota farms in FINBIN for the most recent analysis year is summarized and highlighted. CFFM also assists the Southwest Minnesota Farm Business Management Association, a partner educational program, with the development of its annual report. Both of these reports have undergone significant improvements recently to incorporate more modern data visualization and communication principles to better share insights from the data. CFFM collaborated with EDF and the EDGE Dairy Group to prepare two additional reports regarding cover crop practices of participating farms. CFFM staff also provided several presentations utilizing data from FINBIN. During this project, presentations included the Pre-conference Seminar at the American Bankers Association Agricultural Bankers Conference; EDF cover crop webinar; the Minnesota Bankers' Association Ag Conference; Minnesota FarmFest; National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies conference; U of MN Extension First Friday's staff update; U of MN Extension Advisory Committee; National Farm Management Conference; and the Minnesota Crop Insurance Conference. The reports and presentations CFFM authors use FINBIN data to provide information on farm profitability factors and cost of production impacts for producers. The goal of these efforts is to aid in farm decision-making needs. CFFM staff regularly receives requests from national journalists to provide insights based on trends identified in reports generated through the National Database, including Farm Futures, Public Radio, Farm and Ranch Guide, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Successful Farming, Farm Progress, AgFax, Ag Week, Farm Journal's MILK Business, The Land, The Farmer, Corn and Soybean Digest, Progressive Dairy, and Wells Fargo's Food for Thought newsletter. FINBIN data is cited in educational resources published by farmdoc Daily, Choices Magazine, Farm Foundation Issue Reports, and Farm Table. Collaborative efforts have also been ongoing with Farmer Mac and the Minneapolis Federal Reserve regarding the state of agriculture in the U.S. and, more specifically, the Ninth Federal Reserve District. Links to recent FINBIN data citations are available on the FINBIN homepage in the "FINBIN in the News" section. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?CFFM will continue to work with programs contributing market channel and value-added enterprise data. The goal will be to have enough data submitted from programs to include the information in FINBIN for public query. CFFM will also continue to work on the cover crop benchmarking effort to gather enough field-level data to allow for longitudinal economic analysis of cover crops on a field over time. This functionality exists in FINPACK, but enough data is needed to populate the search mechanism in FINBIN. CFFM will also work to support the Iowa Farm Management Association with their transition to FINPACK and data submission to FINBIN. Additionally, more collaborative work is planned with other benchmarking programs that do not contribute data to the national database, like Illinois and Kansas. A data sharing agreement process is being implemented with programs contributing data to FINBIN. Our goal is to establish an executed agreement with each program over the next year. Work will also continue to further enhance the data visualization aspect of FINBIN, with more Tableau functionality planned to be added to the site in the future. And CFFM will explore the potential use of artificial intelligence (AI) to answer producer benchmarking questions within the FINBIN database. CFFM will also continue to create resources for new programs for the national benchmarking program. These resources will provide more initial direction on how to collaborate with CFFM to provide data to the national benchmarking database. Lastly, an effort to continue evaluating the impact business IQ has on farm financial performance. The goal will be to evaluate this for farms participating in benchmarking programs, but also assess if these programs provide a competitive advantage over producers that do not participate in such programs.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Throughout this project, the Center for Farm Financial Management (CFFM) continued to work closely with farm business management programs and their respective educators/analysts to support their educational efforts and to ensure the National Farm Business Management Benchmarking Database (FINBIN) is as accessible as possible to producers, educators, and other stakeholders across the country. The integrity, accuracy, and trustworthiness of FINBIN are crucial for it to act as a valuable benchmarking resource for producers. CFFM provides continual training and resources to help ensure analysis methods are consistent across programs. All data submitted to FINBIN is thoroughly reviewed and vetted at several stages to eliminate erroneous outliers. So far, for the 2024 analysis year, complete financial information from 3,039 farms from partner farm business management education programs have been submitted to and included in FINBIN from programs in MI, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD, & WI. Additional data is in the process of being aggregated, reviewed, and compiled from programs in IL, NC, SC, NJ, PA, UT, NM, & OH. Data sharing agreements are being formalized with each organization contributing data to FINBIN. The database is hosted by the U of MN and all data for 2024, and for each year going back over two decades, is publicly available on the FINBIN website (finbin.umn.edu). Here any user can generate reports with whole-farm and enterprise summary reports. Additionally, benchmark reports for both whole farm and enterprise-level information across deciles are available. Producers can generate a report comparing their financial ratios versus those in the FINBIN database. All reports in FINBIN can be filtered into various groupings using markers such as year(s), farm types, operator age, state, total crop acres, farming practices, and more. All reports have a minimum number of observations needed to ensure the anonymization of producers whose data is contributed to FINBIN. During the most recent 12-month CFFM internal reporting period, over 17,359 unique website users visited the FINBIN database site and had 30,092 user sessions. Thus, each unique user averaged just over 1.7 user sessions during those twelve months. In these same 12 months, users generated 34,115 reports, translating to approximately 2.0 reports per user. Since the inception of the FINBIN database more than two and a half decades ago, over 700,000 reports have been generated. CFFM is working closely with several new groups across the country to broaden the data available in the national farm financial benchmarking database. This includes an Aquaculture project in Maine and Maryland, the IA Farm Business Management Assoc., a specialty crop, small farm project with Tufts University, a new benchmarking project at New Mexico State University, and a collaborative effort between Minnesota community colleges and the Intertribal Agriculture Council in working with Native American producers. These new groups bring new types of data to the benchmarking effort. Therefore, enhancements in FINPACK and FINBIN have been developed to analyze these new operation types. In addition to working with additional programs submitting data to FINBIN, initial discussions have begun with benchmarking programs not involved with the national FINBIN database to consider collaboration and database expansion. Initially, a report has been drafted to review where our analysis systems are similar and different to help determine the next potential steps in expanding the benchmarking collaboration effort in states like Illinois and Kansas. Furthermore, CFFM continued to work extensively with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Edge Dairy Farmer Cooperative, and farm business management programs in MN, WI, ND, & SD to begin analyzing and benchmarking the economics of cover crop enterprises on farms. This work will continue, and the hope is to have a rich dataset over time to analyze any trends regarding profitability resulting from the use of cover crops more thoroughly. During this past year, CFFM collaborated with the Environmental Defense Fund to publish two reports on this work. One report was focused specifically on the third year of this work, and a second report focused on the cumulative findings thus far from this work. CFFM continues to develop and deploy software improvements in FINPACK to further enhance the value to educators and the producers they work with. Improvements made during this time frame include new software update technology, enhanced options to copy previous analysis reports forward year on year, and improvements to the market channel, and value-added analysis. Additional analysis efficiencies have been added to FINPACK with the latest release of the software. These enhancements allow data to flow through the program more seamlessly, saving users from entering the same data in multiple places. In addition, CFFM has continued the development of extending the FINPACK+ cloud-based version of the software to be available for producers and educators. CFFM has been pilot testing FINPACK+ with the Southwest Minnesota Farm Business Management Association (SWMFBMA). SWMFBMA has been using this version of the software for over two years. Development related to this effort has included architectural program design, user authentication, and other security protocols for users. This work also includes the current development related to updating FINPACK to be a true web application. CFFM has developed tools beyond FINBIN for producers and the professionals who work with them to aid in risk management decision-making needs. Recent developments include an update of FairRent (fairrent.umn.edu) and the new online web apps of My Market Profit (mymarketprofit.umn.edu) and Crop Cost (cropcost.org). These tools assist producers with understanding the cost of production and profitability of their farm enterprises. CFFM has also been collaborating with Dr. David Kohl to use his "Business IQ: Management Factors Scorecard" with benchmarking programs. The goal is to tie a management assessment score to a producer's financials to determine the impact of management on farm profitability. A pilot was completed in 2024, which yielded limited results. Therefore, CFFM is working with Dr. Kohl to enhance the survey. This survey was made available to producers in benchmarking programs and to any other producer interested in gaining insights into their "business IQ". Producers completed a Qualtrics survey (z.umn.edu/BizIQ) and then received their Business IQ score when complete. This project will remain open to gather more producer-level responses, in hopes of tying financial performance to business management performance. Lastly, CFFM is continuing to enhance the data visualization of FINBIN. CFFM has added a Tableau interface (https://z.umn.edu/FINBIN-charts) to make the information gleaned from the national database more accessible and easier to understand for all audiences. The graphs used by CFFM and other benchmarking partners have been refined to better conform to data visualization standards of today. These enhanced graphs have been made available in the Tableau interface. This FINBIN Tableau dashboard will increase user interactivity and enable the exploration of the data that is most relevant to their interests.

Publications

• Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2025 Citation: Van Nurden, P.A., Wantoch, K.L., Wilts Johnson, K.A., Nordquist, D.A. (2025, April). 2024 Minnesota Farm Finances Annual Report. Retrievable at https://www.cffm.umn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/FINBIN-Report-24_FINAL.pdf.
• Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2025 Citation: Van Nurden, P.A., Wantoch, K.L., Paulson, G.J., Knorr, T.L., Sandager, N., Nordquist, D.W. (2025, April). Southwest Minnesota Farm Business Management Association 2024 Annual Report. https://www.cffm.umn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2024-SW-Annual-Report-CFFM-FINAL.pdf.
• Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2025 Citation: Van Nurden, P.A., Wilts Johnson, K.A., Beverly, M.D., Hoang, M.L., Gauthier, V. (2024, September). The Economics of Cover Crops on Minnesota Farms 2024 data report. Retrievable at https://www.cffm.umn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Economics-of-Cover-Crops-on-MN-Farms-Report-2023.pdf.
• Type: Websites Status: Published Year Published: 2025 Citation: FINBIN, Center for Farm Financial Management, University of Minnesota, http://www.finbin.umn.edu