Three LSU AgCenter economists in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness are working on projects to provide tools that aid producers in making important estimations.

Raghav Goyal, Hector Zapata and Michael Deliberto are working on a project to develop an AI-driven price risk management tool for soybean and corn producers in Louisiana.

In researching and developing market intelligence tools for soybean farmers, the team members aim to give producers the ability to determine break-even price levels relative to seed variety, soil type and irrigation practice.

“Successful farming requires not only high productivity but also market intelligence,” Zapata said. “Our goal with this project is to help farmers manage the economics of production and futures market prices through simple-to-use AI-based decision tools.”

This project will create more accessibility for producers to protect and improve their operations. Daily fluctuation of prices makes establishing individual marketing plans difficult, but discovering a market and break-even price helps reduce risk and determine a plan.

“By incorporating different break-even price levels from different tracts or farms, producers can use price discovery from the tool as criteria to identify price targets in their marketing plan,” Deliberto said. “This can act to mitigate risk.”

Louisiana producers will be able to freely access the platform through the LSU AgCenter Extension network. By inputting their individual cost-of-production data, they can receive real-time calculations based on futures prices. Extension agents will be available to assist in setting up and interpreting these personalized marketing plans.

“The goal would be to come up with a foundational tool which would be developed based on all the history of data that we have,” Goyal said. “The farmers will give feedback to extension agents, and extension agents will give that feedback to us, and we’ll use that feedback to improvise these tools and make it more efficient.”

Deliberto is leading another project aimed at helping soybean producers with an economic analysis of farm programs, commodity costs and returns.

The goal is to provide farmers with tools to input their individual data to manage and track costs, evaluate agricultural policy and tailor crop insurance and farm program selections to mitigate risk to their operations, Deliberto said.

Agricultural policy largely affects producers through fluctuation in production costs, commodity prices and fertilizer and fuel prices. The implementation of an actionable policy via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act improved the farm safety net, Deliberto said.

Producers will be able to use these tools and tailor them to their own data inputs and receive different cost structures, break-even targets and desirable yield levels.

“They can use the tools that the AgCenter develops to help them just run different scenarios,” Deliberto said. “They have kind of a financial benchmark to show their banker to evaluate market and cost conditions for the upcoming year.”

Parish agents play a crucial step in the development of these tools. The feedback loop gives the AgCenter the ability to continually edit and tailor tools to the real-life practices and outcomes of production.

“The fact that they have the ability to be changed and tailored towards specific growers and specific crops really aids in that decision-making process,” Deliberto said. “Growers can have a true reflection of the cost per acre to do something with while trying to account for soil site disease pressure, fertility needs, irrigation, crop, etc.”

Providing these data sets that can be tailored to specific producers’ needs is important in determining the right plan for each farmer. The more accurate these tools can be, the better the AgCenter can provide support and mitigate risk to Louisiana soybean and grain production.

“We like to provide growers with as many reports and decision tools as we can,” Deliberto said. “To help them and give them the resources, so that they can make the best decision they can with seeing how these programs work, giving them the ability to run some different scenarios.”