Stochastic Nursery Budgets

By using the Mississippi Budget Generator, S-1021 agricultural economists and horticulturists developed enterprise budgets for a 20-acre nursery operation (Hinson, et al, 2008). Their components - prices for inputs in particular - were based on surveys and on collection of some individual product prices from websites and other sources.

These budgets can be used as benchmarks for a 20-acre nursery operation. In preparing the budgets, it was assumed that there are 10 acres in plant production and 10 acres of service area such as buildings, roads and loading area. Growers are assumed to be landowners, managers and laborers. They are also assumed to be experienced producers and to generally follow University/Extension recommended production practices. The levels of inputs use, input prices, plant growth and yields, and plant prices were evaluated at their mean values.

These budgets can be used to assess the element of risks and uncertainties associated with plant production in a nursery operation. By converting these budgets into Excel format and adding the Simetar software, a stochastic version of these budgets can be developed and manipulated to show the impacts of changing economic conditions. The additional data needed would be the means and standard deviations of critical inputs and outputs and their prices.

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