Farming Simulator Contracts Versus Real Custom Hire Rates

Every spring, somebody at the Saturday market asks if I would mow their hay field. Usually a retired couple with twelve acres, sometimes a horse boarder down the road. The tractor is sitting there between my own jobs, so the question sounds easy. Two years ago I said yes to four of these, charged what felt fair, and at the end of the season my ledger showed I had roughly paid myself $6 an hour for the privilege.

My nephew plays Farming Simulator, and when I complained about this he showed me the contracts screen. Neighbors in the game post field jobs, you see the payout up front, and you can accept or skip. It looked so clean that I sat down and compared it line by line with what I had actually earned. The gap between the two is a decent lesson for anyone thinking about custom work with a small tractor.

How contracts work in the game

In Farming Simulator 22, other farmers in the map offer jobs: mowing, baling, plowing, harvesting, spreading fertilizer. Each contract shows the field, the task and the reward before you commit. If you lack the right machine, the game will lend you one for a fee taken from the payout. Finish the job and the money lands in your account. Fail or cancel and you lose some standing.

It is a well built system for the game. Early on, contracts are the fastest way to earn money without owning much land, and plenty of players spend their first few hours doing nothing else. The problem is what the screen leaves out, because those are exactly the costs that ate my season.

The hours nobody pays you for

In the game, you click the contract and you are at the field. Real custom work has road time. My four jobs averaged 25 minutes each way at tractor speed, and two of them needed two visits, one to mow and one to rake. That is over five hours of seat time across the season that nobody was paying for, plus fuel.

Then there is the timing problem. In the game, a contract waits for you. In real life, every hay field in the county is ready the same week, including mine. The weather window that suits my customers is the same window I need for my own first cutting. Twice I mowed someone else's field first because I had promised, and my own hay got rained on. That loss never showed up as a line item, but it was real, probably $300 to $400 in quality I could not sell at my usual price.

The game pays you for the acres. Real custom work also charges you for the calendar.

"Just charge the going rate" is half the answer

Everyone tells you to look up custom rates. That is good advice as far as it goes. Extension services publish custom rate surveys, Iowa State runs one of the best known, and they show what operators in a region report charging per acre or per bale. I use them as a starting point every year.

The catch is that the survey rate is an average across operators with very different machinery. A guy running a 12 foot discbine covers ground at nearly twice my speed. If I charge his per-acre rate with my 9 foot disc mower, I am earning half his hourly income on the same job. The survey tells you what customers expect to pay. It does not tell you what your machine needs to charge.

My ledger, one mowing job, worked out

Here is the arithmetic for a typical job from that season, a 9.5 acre field about 4 miles from my place. My tractor is a 45 horsepower utility model with a disc mower, and on a decent field it covers about 3.2 acres an hour.

Eight dollars and change for nearly four hours. The insurance line is what killed it. My farm policy did not cover working other people's land, so I added a rider. Spread over four small jobs, it swallowed most of the margin. Spread over twenty jobs, it would have been $32 each and the job would have paid about $136 for my time, which is a different conversation.

That is the real lesson from the comparison. The game has no fixed costs attached to contract work, so every contract is profitable. Real custom work has a threshold. Below a certain number of jobs, the fixed costs make every one of them a loss, no matter how fair the per-acre rate looks.

Where the game gets it right

I will give Farming Simulator one thing. The option to borrow equipment for a cut of the payout is a surprisingly honest piece of design. It makes you ask whether the job is worth doing if you have to rent the machine, which is the exact question anyone should ask before buying an implement to do custom work. A secondhand mower bought to chase contracts is a bet on volume, and buying secondhand machinery already carries enough uncertainty without adding an uncertain income stream on top.

The game is also right that small contracts teach you the machine. I learned more about adjusting my mower on other people's rough fields than on my own, and I fixed most of what broke myself, which is the only way the repair reserve stays at $7.50 an hour. If you are not comfortable doing that, my numbers will not hold for you. There is more on that side of things in why farmers maintain their own machinery.

What I changed

I now take custom work only if I can line up at least ten jobs for the season, all within six miles, and I schedule my own hay first in writing so nobody is surprised. I charge per acre with a minimum of $150 per visit, which handles the small fields that used to lose me money. Last season that came out to roughly $41 an hour for my time after every cost above. Not a fortune, but income that smooths the gaps, and a farm income that changes every month needs every smooth patch it can get.

For more of these game-against-ledger comparisons, the games section has the rest.

Before you say yes to that first neighbor

Call your insurance agent this week and ask one question: what does it cost to cover me mowing or baling on land I do not own? Divide that number by the jobs you realistically expect. If the answer is more than a third of what you would charge per job, either find more jobs or say no politely.