Farm Trends
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Corn Price is Now Higher Than Wheat!
Historically, wheat prices have generally been higher than corn prices and sometimes the difference can be major. In many years, wheat could be $1 or $2 higher than corn. This is due to two main reasons: Corn was primarily used for feed Wheat was more heavily used for bread and other products directly consumed as […]
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Motorcycle Trip Along the Minnesota River
On Saturday, I met up with a couple of my partners in the CPA firm in New Ulm, Minnesota to ride motorcycles. We left about 9:30 in the morning and drove out of town up onto a nice flat area with very good looking crops. We then dropped back down into the Minnesota River Vally […]
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The Pacific NW Wheat Harvest is Late!
My wife and I rode our motorcycle from Yakima to Lewiston on Thursday with a stop in Walla Walla. Normally this time of year, wheat harvest would be in full throttle, however, I noticed very little harvesting going on that day. I visited with my Uncle and Aunt at their house on Thursday and spoke […]
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A Switch in Farm Loan Levels
The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City just published their National Trends in Farm Lending for the second quarter of this year. Due to the increase in input costs, operating loan levels have increased dramatically from the second quarter of 2010, up nearly 36%. The number of livestock loans dropped slightly from the year before, […]
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Estimate Your Monthly Social Security Benefit
The Social Security Administration has a nice retirement calculator on their website that will project what your monthly social security benefit will be if you retire at: Normal retirement age (for most of us this will be somewhere between age 66 and 67), Age 70, and Age 62 The calculator takes into account your current […]
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Dying Days of Ethanol Subsidies?
The Wall Street Journal in today’s paper had a good article on how ethanol subsidies are even closer to being eliminated. Under the proposed deficit-reduction plan proposed on Thursday, the 45 cents a gallon blenders credit would be eliminated, however, more than $600 million of aid would be given to service stations to help promote […]
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Mexico to End Tariffs on Fruit and Other Ag Products
There is an old saying that when politics gets involved, farming can suffer. One of the prime examples of this was issue of allowing Mexican truckers to bring products into the US by truck which was allowed for several years. However, politics got involved a few years ago and the US stopped this and Mexico […]
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Watch For The State Tax Grab!
Most farmers enjoy certain state tax exemptions that are not always available to other businesses in that state. For example, in my state of Washington, almost all businesses pay a state Business and Occupation (B&O) tax based upon gross sales. As a CPA, our firm pays a 1.8% tax on all of our services performed in […]
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Check Your FUTA Wages
I never thought I would write a post on FUTA (Federal Unemployment) taxes, but here I go. The original FUTA tax rate was 6% with an up to 5.4% credit for taxes paid to your state. Starting in 1976, Congress had tacked on a surtax of .2% for a gross FUTA rate of 6.2%. This […]
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What’s Your RLU?
A farm enterprise must be able to generate enough revenue and net income to support at least one farm family which I call a “living unit”. A farm operation should calculate how much revenue the farm generates each year and divide that both by the number of full-time equivalent employees (FTE) and “living units”. To […]