January, 2012
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Tomorrow’s Top Producer Recap
Today was the Tomorrow’s Top Producer at the Chicago Hilton. Several speakers gave great presentations on various subjects. Chris Barron of Carson and Barron Farms, Inc. gave a very interesting hour and half seminar on creating effective collaborations of multiple generations of farmers and farms. This collaboration does not utililize a formal partnership for the operation, but rather gets like […]
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See You in Chicago
On Monday, my wife and I will be traveling to Chicago for the Top Producer seminars that begin on Tuesday. Tuesday is set aside for the Tomorrow’s Top Producer and I will be speaking at a breakout session dealing with what is the right entity selection for a beginning Top Producer. The main Top Producer […]
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Don’t Forget SE Tax Changes for 2011 Tax Returns!
The Self-Employment (SE) tax rules for 2011 tax returns are different than the rules for 2010 tax returns, which were different than the rules for 2009 tax returns. The Job Creation Act of 2010 reduced the Social Security tax component of the SE tax from 12.4% to 10.4%, for 2011 only. Therefore, the SE tax rate […]
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Watch Out for FUTA and SUTA!
Many of our clients operate their farm operation as either an S or C corporation and in many cases the only employee of the corporation is the farmer and perhaps their spouse and children. Many of these farmers do not report any wages to them until the fourth quarter of the year. In these cases, […]
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Rural Mainstreet Index Remains Strong – But is it Topping Out?
Creighton University produces a Rural Main Street Index based upon a survey of rural bankers in six states, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming. The index ranges from 0 to 100. Anything over 50 is considered in an expansion mode. For January, the index rose to 59.8 from 59.7 in December which is […]
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Deferred Grain Sales Update
It is now apparent when I wrote my post last week on electing out of deferred sales contracts, that my terminology was not the best. Sometimes when writing these posts, I know what I mean but when transmitting the brain waves to the keyboard, it does not always get put down correctly. The correction on […]
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It’s All or None On Deferred Grain Sales
We had a reader ask the following question: “You previously wrote about electing out of deferred farm sales where the farmer could elect to include the income for a March delivery contract into the previous year to increase his taxable income in the previous year. I deferred my payment on my 2011 grain until 1/3/12. […]
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What’s New on the Form 1120 for 2012
For those farmers who have corporations for their farm operations, there are several changes to the form 1120 for this year. These changes are as follows: Merchant card and third-party payments. For the 2011 tax year, the IRS has deferred the requirement to separately report on the corporation’s tax return the amount of merchant card […]
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Reminder on Your FUTA Tax Return!
Several farm states including Illinois and Minnesota will not be able to claim the full 5.4% credit when filing their form 940 Federal Unemployment tax return this year. This is due to these states not yet repaying the federal government the funds they borrowed to make state unemployment payments over the last few years. IRS […]
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Is This a Different Farm Boom?!
I think the Kansas City Federal Reserve is one of my favorite sites to get good farm information. In a recent issue of the Main Street Economist Agricultural and Rural Analysis, they had an article entitled “Is This Farm Boom Different?” The article recapped the two primary farm booms of the 20th century. In the […]