Something that was haywire was broken, but not so broken that it couldn't be made serviceable by the industrious application of some bailing wire. I suppose we might say that today many farmers' and ranchers' budgets are haywire, if not the whole darned farm economy. Today's farm economy has a lot of operators reaching for financial bailing wire. Extracting profits requires a lot of hard thinking supplemented by finger-numbing keyboard pounding. Many farmers and ranchers are having to re-think their operations, develop new strategies and modify their operations.
Operators have to think several times before buying a new piece of equipment.
Better yet, they need to run some numbers through the computer until they come out with a few positive dollar signs attached. Some of those numbers have to do with the question of whether they should replace a piece of equipment or hire custom services. Or, flip side, perhaps they have equipment they could use to do some custom harvesting that would bring in enough money to put their own budgets in the black. The nut of the problem lies in determining what to pay or charge for custom services. Washington State University's Herbert Hinman has explored the subject and produced a printed publication and a computer software program that farmers and ranchers can use to evaluate custom harvesting decisions.