Practical financial tools designed to help farmers better understand financial decisions.

Farm Debt Refinance Analysis

Compare your existing debt structure to a proposed refinance or restructuring. The tool separates the impact of refinancing existing debt from the impact of additional new money, so you can see what the refinance itself actually accomplishes.

Includes analysis of: annual debt service, principal repayment, interest expense, weighted-average interest rate, weighted-average amortization, and additional borrowing.

Two-Loan Beginning Farmer Land Purchase

This is a land purchase spreadsheet that allows you to enter two loans, a primary lender and an FSA second loan. It shows a two crop rotation and has a price shock grid. There is also a table that shows your equity position after 10 years under three assumptions: 1% annual appreciation, no appreciation, and 1% annual depreciation, along with remaining loan balances.

Farm Balance Sheet

Includes farm and personal entries. Edit the input cells but other cells are locked. Shows a market value balance sheet, with an option to enter your Adjusted Tax Basis on applicable asset schedules. The loan schedule can handle monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual payments. Enter the last payment date and it will calculate estimated accrued interest as of the date of the balance sheet.

Try it out. This is version 1.0. Share what you like, don’t like, would like to see different.

There’s a Dashboard tab and gives some relevant ratios and measures.

Excess Equipment Grid

This tool shows the economic impact, on a per acre basis, of “excess equipment”. Think of excess equipment and over and above what is prudent, cost minimizing, or profit maximizing. Lenders, pundits, and others often talk about “loving new paint” or having too much equipment for the size operation. This interactive grid can show you the impact plainly.

The left side of the spreadsheet shows farm size, and across the top the grid shows increasing amounts of “excess equipment” from $100,000 to $1 million. You enter interest rate, and depreciation rate. This will show how interest and depreciation impact the economic magnitude of owning equipment. At the bottom, you can input the wage equivalent of 1 hired laborer, and put the value of excess equipment in terms of a hired laborer.

Anything over $50 gets shaded in RED. Play around with the numbers and see how it changes.

Farmland Purchase Template

This tool looks at a prospective farmland purchase, using traditional one-loan financing. The template creates cashflows for corn, soybeans, or a 50/50 mix. It provides cashflow breakevens under different yield assumptions, net cashflow under different grain price assumptions, an ability to capture CRP or other income, and then it includes a separate tab that summarizes the farm purchase under higher or lower purchase prices.

With just 15 user-inputs, it creates a wealth of things to look at.

Grain Cashflow and Breakeven

This is version 1.0 or the “original” cashflow from TikTok. Yellow cells can be input/changed. This shows a cashflow that breaks out two commodities on owned and rented land.

These tools are provided free of charge. If you’ve found Farm Debt Help useful and would like to support the development of additional free resources, optional contributions can be sent via

Venmo: @Econ90

There is no obligation to contribute.