Food Plot Service Pricing

[BoneCrusher20]

I know most of us do most of our own food plotting, may be the one time i consider hiring it out.....I'm trying to get jump on lining someone up for next spring. I have some areas looking to plant lot of switchgrass and honestly i have very poor luck w/ frost seeding switchgrass and this is pretty good size area, so for 1x thing was looking at hiring someone to drill it in to ensure some better germination. Any idea on expectations of pricing (excluding seed)??

 

[Mennoniteman]

The way that I roughly figure out something like this is that a large sized sized piece of equipment is around $125-150 dollars an hour, a medium sized piece is $100, and a compact tractor runs about $75. So if you hire a a 75 hp tractor and drill to do a four acre field it's going to take 4 hours and might cost around $400 dollars.
One thing with hiring a farmer to do fieldwork, the rates often tend to be all over the place, since a lot of farmers don't do much custom farming, while when hiring an excavator the prices are all in line with each other since they won't have any work if they are too high.
Often it seems to depend what mood the farmer is in on the particular day that you ask them, If you do a few favors for a neighboring farmer they will often do a small project for free since most farmers tend to be nice people by nature if you stay on the good side of them.