This year's harvesting of crops has gone well overall - up 10 percent on last year.
But the cost of key infrastructure has also increased with the price of machinery up by as much as 30 percent, making it even tougher for farmers to make ends meet.
Radish seeds are thriving as the Canterbury plains bask in warm and sunny weather - just what farmers want as they count down the days to harvest.
Federated Farmers arable chair David Birkett said Canterbury has had a good harvest.
"We needed to because the cost of our production has gone up significantly," he said.
That includes fertiliser and infrastructure, but the largest cost relates to machinery.
"Those prices have gone up by about 30 percent, so combine harvesters - which we use to harvest now - that did cost $600-odd-thousand are now a million dollars and that's started to be out of reach for the average farmer," Birkett said.
The combination of good weather and higher yield - up by about 10 percent – has not been enough to meet to the shortfall.
"It's certainly costing farmers more, there's a lot more farmers who will be making a loss this year."
None more so than maize growers on the North Island's east coast, where harvest is about to get underway.
"The contracts are back probably about $150 a tonne and last year's stuff hasn't been picked up in a lot of cases," Federated Farmers Gisborne-Wairoa president Toby Williams said.
This has created storage issues, with cheaper product coming in from Ukraine and fewer dairy farmers adding grain to their feed.
Some crops also had to be replanted multiple times in flood-damaged paddocks late last year.
"Yields are back a bit on what you'd expect because of the late planting so guys are really struggling with that but we're really hoping they get something off, the last two or three years they've had nothing at all.
"These growers need a win, they need something to get them going, because if they don't get well paid this year or they don't get paid... they won't be back next year."
The next three months is crucial to how the next three years could look.
