Knowledge of the number of days suitable for conducting fieldwork is instrumental to farm management decision making especially for machinery, acreage acquisition and crop allocation decision making. Although each year is unique, understanding historic trends in the number of days that fieldwork can be conducted is useful for farm management decision makers. The steps necessary to obtain historic data from USDA, assemble the data into a usable database and apply the information to a series of farm management decision making problems under planting and harvesting situations are demonstrated.