Ag Policy
-
2012 US Farm Census
The USDA performs a farm census every five years. They just released the final numbers for the 2012 census. Over the next few months, I will do various posts regarding this census on a more detailed basis, but I thought I would give some highlights now: Total US farm sales for 2012 were $395 billion […]
-
AICPA Ag Conference
I was the chairperson for the 2014 AICPA Ag Conference held in Austin, Texas last week. One of the slogans that we constantly saw walking around Austin was “Keep Austin Weird” and I can tell you there are certainly some “weird” people walking around downtown Austin. We had about 200 people attend the conference and […]
-
100 Million Not 10 Million
In my last post, I referenced a sample dairy farmer taking advantage of the Dairy Margin Dashboard put out by the University of Illinois. Since my eyes have gotten a little older, I missed the fact that my input was based on 100 million pounds, not 10 million pounds. Everything else is correct, other than […]
-
Nice Dairy Margin Management Dashboard
The University of Illinois issues a daily “farmdoc” and today’s release was a nice dashboard for dairy farmers to determine how much margin protection they could have received if the margin protection program had been around since 2000. The dairy farmer can plug in their elected coverage levels; the amount of protection they want (from $4 […]
-
Updated Average Marketing Prices 2013/14
The USDA releases updated prices on almost all major (and many minor) commodity crops at the end of each month. The latest report was released today. Since ARC will be based upon the average price received by farmers for their crop for the marketing year, we can take these monthly reports and obtain an average price […]
-
ARC Versus PLC – 2014-2018
We have gotten several questions regarding which program is better – ARC or PLC. There is no one right answer to this question since there are so many unknown variables. However, I decided to run out the numbers for corn, soybeans and wheat assuming certain crop marketing prices for each year. For corn, I elected […]
-
Farm Bill Webinar
This morning at 10 am Central Time we had an one hour webinar on the new farm bill. We had several hundred people accessing the webinar and based upon the amount of questions that came over the screen as I was discussing the farm bill, this appears to be a very hot topic right now. Since there […]
-
Very Limited Availability for AICPA Ag Conference
This post is primarily for our CPA readers out there. I was just informed yesterday that there is extremely limited availability for the AICPA Ag Conference that will be held in Austin on May 7 to May 9. If you are interested in attending, here is the link on the AICPA site to sign up. […]
-
FSA Releases New Farm Bill Fact Sheet
The FSA released today a six page fact sheet on the new farm bill. It recaps the major changes that were included in the 900+ page farm bill. Most of the material has been covered on several of our posts over the last month or so. We are doing a webinar on the new farm bill […]
-
Real Estate Includes Land but Not For Depreciation Purposes
We had a reader send in the following comments and question: “I appreciated your information on the tax reform proposal. In your 4th bullet point on depreciation, you stated that “Most if almost all farm real estate…would be over 40 years and not the current 10 or 20 years.” It has been my understanding that […]