[PureHarvest]

Well put Joseph!

BigVan, for your purposes, its never to late to start tracking and planning. You can't manage what you don't measure in my opinion.
Most successful business aren't winging it. I did for years, and looking back, it was the root cause of my failures. It wasn't lack of effort or knowledge. I put in 16+ hr days and studied and asked and read and visited.
I deluded myself by thinking I was planning by listing out the production costs to start the year, but then really never reconciled that to my results. Also, I left out a ton of things I blew off as inconsequential. Especially fixed costs and learning to depreciate things like equipment.
I'm sure there are those that will read this and think, DUH Dude, but I just never put it all together even thought i knew the resources were out there. Typically they were too generic, and my brain would turn off.
So I basically looked at what I spent versus what I brought in by the end of the year, and called that my balance sheet.
Doing an enterprise budget lets you actually see the whole picture and allows for accurate planning for the future.

For me, it took finding the right template to use in a way that was tailored to a small farm, to click in my brain.

Now I can spend hours plugging in different scenarios to plan different crops and enjoy the process.
Like if you have $500 bucks plugged in for compost soil amendment, and you find some for $200, when you plug that in, everything automatically recalculates and you see how it affects the bottom line. Now imagine doing that for everything it takes to produce your crop, and/or doing that for your yield and sales price. It's fun to look at what ifs, then follow up at the end of the year with what actually happened.