How Much Profit Cattle Hay Made in 1 Year Small Farm

Now in this video, I'll break down how much money I made on 15 acres of hay and then raising five head of cattle. Now this video took over a year to make and will go from what I sold my round bales for out of the field to how much I made per head selling cattle online direct to consumer. I'll include every single number in detail along the way and even how much this YouTube channel made over the past year making these types of videos. And if you appreciate these videos I put out, all I ask is that you subscribe and hit the like button. First we'll go into calculating our hay income and then come back and look at how our cattle did. Now for making hay, I'll break down my equipment lineup that I'll be using. My main tractor is a 1966 4020. I paid 8,500 bucks for it about three years ago now and then at times I borrow my brother's 4020 and get a cab on it if I need a second tractor. For the mower this year, I just got an old Hestan 1120 hay bind that I bought off a neighbor for scrap price. It was sitting in a tree line, hadn't been used for years and then I did some repairs on it before this hay season. All in the mower cost me about $700 after the repairs. Next my hay rake I bought over the winter as well at an auction for $900. Then I got an older John Deere square baler, paid three grand for it. When I ted the hay, I rent the neighbor's tedder and then when I'm making round bales, I have the same neighbor come and custom do it for me. I don't have a round baler. And then the field we're going to be making hay on is 15 acres. It's split into two different fields. I planted the field in spring of 2024 and so this stand should last roughly four years and so the establishment cost of this field, I divide it over four years. It comes to $80 an acre each year and so now it's May, the hay is ready to get cut and we're using our new mower for the first time here. Is it crimping it or not? Let's grab a random there's a crimp there's a crimp every and that's what we want so the plant's going to dry out a lot faster when it's cracked. When we mow the field, we burn about a gallon of diesel per acre. That brings our fuel cost around four dollars an acre and then I price in six dollars an acre for equipment expense. That's maintenance and service on the tractor and then the mower as well. We finished mowing the five acre field and all 15 acres are now cut. The hay is on the ground starting to dry out and we just hope for no rain. The next morning, I came back with a tedder. We don't burn as much fuel on this pass as it's easy on the tractor but we're renting the tedder so that comes to $11 an acre for tedding. Once the hay is dry, it's ready to rake up. Again, fuel cost is really easy on this and it raking goes really fast. That cost me $5 an acre and none of these calculations have my labor costs included. It's just fuel and equipment expense. Then once it's raked up, my neighbor came with his round baler and we started to bale it up. The cost of having somebody to come round bale for me came to $56 an acre for round baling. Then the next day, we loaded out the bales and got them all sold. We ended up making 54 round bales in total. On average, they weighed 1,500 pounds. That came to about 2.7 tons per acre or three and a half bales per acre. We sold them to two neighbors. They both feed them out to cattle and we got a total revenue of $4,180. Then our total cost for first cutting came to $1,250. That leaves us with a profit of $2,900 on first cutting of hay. One thing that's not included in that hay profit is our land cost. I'll wait till we get all of our cuttings in and then factor in our land cost at the end. Then after first cutting, we got a bunch of rain. By the time the field finally dried out, the plants were laying down and over and it was just going to make poor quality hay. I did get it cut. Then I came back, tetted it. Then all of a sudden, rain chances started to increase in the forecast and before the hay could dry out, we got some rain. It ended up raining 10 inches over the next week before I could get back in the field and bale it up. Like some moldy parts, obviously sitting in water there. The reason we're baling it today is because we're going to get even more rain tonight. Now, I'm back a couple days later after we got these baled that one night and we got another inch of rain, like one and a half inches. There's just earthworms everywhere that got swamped out, pushed up to the ground. You can just smell them. They're everywhere. I think the birds are eating good. It looks like the bird tried to eat that one. The crazy thing is they're actually calling for more rain tonight into tomorrow morning. They were saying an inch or two. Now, they're saying a bit less, which is good. Then the two-week forecast is starting to look a little better. If it keeps raining like it is, just the ground is soaked. There's ponds in all these fields. Just the water table is so high that an inch is a lot of rain now. We ended up getting over 15 inches of rain July, which came to a record. Probably the worst part is part of the field got flooded and killed off the plants. In the end, second cutting came to a loss as my expenses and time to make the hay was bigger than any revenue I got. Fast forward now, it is time for third cutting. The rain did slow down. We're going to make square bales instead of round bales for this. We got the square baler hooked up. Gosh, these seem good. Weight-wise, they seem pretty dang good. Well, they're barely good. All right, we're going to get going here. We're going to run second gear. These might be hair on the wet side, but plenty of space on the rack. I wanted to make sure that we were good. Yeah, we'll fit all this on here. No problem. All right, we're bailing pretty good. Very dry, so the dust here. All right, we're done. We filled a rack. I didn't count how many there and happy with it. I'm going to clean the baler out. We are done for the year. Square baling. Here's our whole hay season in one spreadsheet. Tried to make it as simple as possible. Here is our first cutting, how many round bales we made, second cutting, and then third as well. Already broke down the numbers on first cutting. Our profit came to $2,900. This was really the only good cutting of the year. Second cutting was a loss, $250 of just producing the hay, let alone, I haven't factored in our land costs. Then third cutting really didn't yield that much, 200 square bales, and then sold them for $1,800. We made a decent amount of money too. Our costs weren't that high. I did all the baling. Again, no labor is calculated in our cost. Then here's our gross profit there, $4,100. Now we're going to include our seeding cost. Again, alfalfa and hay is like a perennial, so it grows year after year. Ideally, I seeded it in 2024. We'll get a good cutting in 2025, 2026, 2027, and then probably put it back into corn in 2028. That brings a gross profit of $195 an acre, but we have interest expense because I have a loan on the land. Then when you own the land, you have property tax that comes to $340 an acre total between the two. That puts us in the hole, $145 an acre. Then here's the sum on the side here. Then we have an equity payment on the loan, 220. Cashflow farming came to negative $365 an acre. This was probably one of the hardest years to make hay in central Iowa. We got, I believe, the most rain in the past 20, 30 years. Also, my fields are not ideal. They're like creek bottom fields with trees all around it, especially one, so it doesn't dry out. If it's going to be a wet year, that field, it's nearly impossible to make hay. Then lastly, something cool that I'm willing to share is how much we got off of YouTube. Just pure AdSense on the videos that I made about farming and making hay on these 15 acres. In total, we were just shy of $10,000 of YouTube income. That is just pure revenue. No taxes are taken out of that. My time, labor, camera equipment, editing time, none of that is factored in. This is just pure AdSense revenue. You get paid. This video will make some money. That comes to $657 an acre. If you factor that in, then we're making money farming. We come out with a positive $4,300 if we factor in YouTube money. These are my numbers for hay. I include the YouTube revenue part. Just try and be as transparent as possible. If you guys could hit the subscribe button when I share these numbers, I'm going to share my numbers on how much we made on cattle too after this. I'm going to include my YouTube income as well. All I ask is that you hit the subscribe button and I will continue to keep showing how much this YouTube channel makes and just share all my numbers because I know you guys appreciate it. If you appreciate it, just hit the subscribe button. Now we are going to look at how much money we made on cattle. Back in January of 2025, we bought five feeder calves. We paid a price of $2.95 a pound for them. That came to right around $2,000 on average per head. On average, they weighed about 660 pounds. Those are some round veils that we made this summer. That's what we'll be feeding out. Then all the hay that we make over this next spring and summer will come to here. That's one of our calves right there. Just like Josie, she's 650 pounds. To raise cattle, I work with my neighbor Adam. All the infrastructure you see, buildings, bunks, fences, everything shoots, none of that is mine. Adam will be essentially custom feeding them for me. I bought the calves and then I will pay him to custom feed them out. Then from January to September, we fed them out. I documented that whole process on my channel over multiple videos showing every month as we went by, saw them growing, what they ate, how they lived. Then September rolled around and they were finished out and ready to go. We loaded them on the trailer, brought them to a locker and got them harvested. We ended up selling all of our calves through FarmerGrade where we sold them by the cut. Then the rest of the group, the majority of the group is Adam's cattle that he sold locally. He sells them by the quarter, half or full. Then here is how the numbers ended up for the year. Our spreadsheet turned out pretty good. We'll go left from right. We have all the calves labeled here, all five. This is the purchase pressure we paid per head. The total comes to $9,600 and the starting weight of each calf. They were around 650 pounds. Then we bought them again at $2.95 a pound for the feeder calves. Our total investment on cattle, we then fed them out. Here comes their final weights, what they would have weighed on the scale. Average finished weight of 1,350. Then we have feeding costs. For them to grow, they had to eat. They had to live in a building that I didn't own. Then Adam, 90% of the time, was the one there feeding, doing all the work. We calculate the feeding cost at $1.20 per pound of gain. That brings our total for feeding to $4,224. If you add these two numbers invested, it comes to $13,800. That's the total amount of dollars we invested this year into raising cattle. Then when they go to be harvested, we get a hot carcass weight. This is how you get a yield price. Then we sold it at $3.95 per pound, per carcass pound. That brings all of our sales on a per head basis. The highest one sold for right at $3,500, but our total revenue to $16,300. Then lastly, our profit. The most profitable one came in at $637 per head, which is insane. Again, cattle prices went up a lot from when we bought the calves to when they were finished and we harvested them. We came out with a profit of just about $2,400 on the five head. I did factor in a 2% death loss. Obviously, we only have five calves here. That's just assuming if you raised 100 this year, that two of them would have died from sickness, from an injury, if they break their leg, if some lightning strikes. Then as simple as I can make it, we have our dollar invested. Then we have our dollar return. Our return on investment comes to our $2,300 number or 17.2%. Just like when we were making hay, I made YouTube videos on our cattle operation here. Over the course of the year, it brought in $10,200 on YouTube ad revenue. My conclusion on this chart was it was a good year to own cattle. From when we bought in January and sold in September, cattle prices went up a lot. On average, we made right at $480 a head. If you would have fed out 100 head, that would have came to $47,000. What I'm doing here with five head does seem like a lot of dollar investment at $13,800 that you have to put into this. For context, for people who don't know, feeding out five calves is like working 30 minutes a week instead of 40 hours a week and expecting to make a living. I just need to put that context out there. My conclusion on the hay as well, again, this is 15 acres. This is so small. This is not a full-time job. It does take some time, but this is like a part-time job. This is weekend stuff. We also grew 30 acres of corn this year and about 45 of beans. Farming now, especially conventionally, is a game of economics of scale. As you cover more acres, you lower your cost and your margins increase slightly. How I'm farming by starting out and purchasing the land that I'm farming on is the slow, painful route where you go like this for 10 years. Then eventually, you get the land paid off. Then you start to make some money and things start to look profitable. It's the delayed gratification route. The only way you can really make it work and start farming is to have off-farm income. I share these numbers because I've gotten so much value from other people sharing their numbers online and watching on YouTube. Then I want to get across to younger people that it is a large capital investment to get started farming. To get started and to safely get started without a bunch of risk and a bunch of debt is probably have a separate income unless you have some sort of advantage or something going on. When I make these videos, I am never, ever, ever complaining at all. Super fortunate to make these YouTube videos. You guys enjoy them. It makes money. That's pretty crazy to think about. My grandparents and even my parents wouldn't have been able to visualize that 20, 30 years ago that you could do that. I've had a few comments where people don't fully understand the big picture of farming and where it's at today. Farming and agriculture goes in cycles. Right now, we peak in 2021, 2022, and then it's starting to come down in 2023. It's flatlined in 2024 and 2025. You need to look at farming over a 10-year period and take averages. A lot of my numbers, especially corn and soybeans this year and last, is starting to get to the bottom. It can go lower, for sure, and it can stay low for a long period of time. You do need that context. For example, this year, it was hard to make it in central Iowa because we got so much rain. That also means that places that are normally dry got a lot of rain this year. There was drought in 2021, 2022, a little bit of 2023. Pasture, grass didn't grow as much. People couldn't make hay, maybe in areas that are drier out west, down south. The demand for hay was very high. Then the supply was very low because nobody could make it. Hay prices went up. This year, with all the rain moisture we got, people didn't demand it because grass grew good, pastures grew good. You could have cattle out on the fields longer. They didn't need to be fed hay as quickly. Then the supply of hay went up at the same time when the demand went down. Hay prices have gone down a lot, and that's what you see on this chart. Everything in context, I'm spilling it all out there for you guys. Hopefully, you enjoyed. Hit the like button, subscribe, and thank you guys for watching.