I'll be following as I'm in the middle doing something similar but a bit longer in length....Starting a Software Company in 100 Days via a daily video journal.
Other than alfalfa, the vast majority of the farms that I know of that supply large dairies take advantage of crop rotations. These are from crop farms that supply large dairies in Minnesota and South Dakota.
I'm the founder of a company called Harvest Profit. We build a suite of profitability and risk management tools, trying to help farmers better manage their operations.
Farming is a unique business where the average farm generates $1+ million of revenue and is self-managed.
I agree with this article. More farmers are taking on the duties of merchandising their commodities and we help them with that. It's a fun challenge.
As an aside, selling intangible goods like software to farmers (who love equipment) is not for the faint of heart!
I was doing consulting work in the space, saw a need, and built the product. I came into it knowing the traits of farmer, the lingo, etc. That and a good product have helped us gain trust
I ran a one man side gig for a couple years (farm management software). Got it to $200k and growing after 6 months in the market but I needed to bring the development in-house.
Could've used outsourced talent for all dev and customer support but interestingly enough the reason why I hired was "what happens to all of our customers if I die?". I felt like I owed it to them to put a team in place, albeit a small one.
I launched a farm management software tool in Dec 2016 and spent 2017 iterating on it. Hired two developers in the last 5 months and made a big hire last week, myself. I'm going to transition out of my consulting business into this full time. Bootstrapped with $300k of revenue in '17. https://www.harvestprofit.com
I haven't published anything or sought to. I should look into that. I've been laser focused on the blog and email list. I need to broaden my reach though.
300 lbs of urea or .65 boe of NG (1 bbl of oil = 20 gallons of gas and 11 gallons of diesel). So let's just say 20 additional gallons of fuel to account for the N
Edit: the land would be planted to wheat if not planted to corn. Wheat uses approximately 80% of the N as corn. The land wouldn't sit idle.
We have a small North Dakota farm (500 acres) but I work with some larger farms (10,000+ acres). Farm management consulting and software is my full time gig
My farm. 6 gallons in tractor fuel and 2 gallons in truck fuel. If we didn't raise corn, we'd raise wheat which has similar fertility requirements as corn. Maybe a bit more urea on corn, 50 pounds or .11 barrels of oil equivalent.