The idea for this blog was a glimmer in my mind at the end of 2008.  While surfing on the web, I found the Golden Practices web-site that listed different industry specific blogs.  This spurred me to action and with their help, we had a fully up and running blog site in the first quarter of this year.  Some of the experiences and reflections that I have for 2009 are:

• 1.  Our readers are a very geographically diverse group.  I expected to have most of my readers from the corn belt of the US, while this is true, we seem to have many readers from India, Australia, Canada, Europe and all over the globe.  I assume most of them read English and I hope they have learned a lot about US farming.

2.  Altough I am a CPA by trade, I grew up on a farm and farmers are business people first, and taxes and finance and accounting is just part of the equation.  I have tried to balance my posts with operations, marketing, accounting, taxes and trends. 

3.  I believe that the mega trends are and will continue to support farming as a great business going forward.  All of the world has to eat and this requires farm.  Horse and carriage was replaced by cars which may be replaced by some other form of transportation a 100 years from now, but we will still be farming at that time.  China and India other growing countries will demand better food with more protein as they mature.  Our American farmers will be there to provide a lot of this food.

4.  I have set an ambitious goal for myself to get some type of online “Farmers Tax Guide” up and running by the end of 2010.  I have several parts of it done, but to be fully operational and run the way I want it to may require programming skills that I do not currently have.  Also, with tax season for me rapidly approaching, not much will get done between now and April 15.

5.  The best thing about this blog are the wonderful people that I have met or communicated with that are doing similar blogs.   A couple that you should check out at “The Exuberant Accountant“, “The Roth & Company Tax Update Blog“, and “Legacy by Design“.  You can not go wrong by checking these sites out.

6.  I thought I would get more comments on the postings and for several months, I did not get any at all.  Recently, I have started to get more comments and e-mails and I really appreciate the feedback.

7.  I also enjoyed trying to work up “White Papers” or “Tax Bulletins” on subjects that my readers have questions on.  I have already done several of these and I am planning on putting them in a little better format and posting them to the site early in 2010.

Last, but not least, we want to wish everybody a prosperous New Year in 2010 and we look forward to seeing what the year brings.

MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I can not believe that Christmas will be here tomorrow.  Between having two boys in high school, one in college and one that just graduated, it seems like I can still remember being bigger than they were.  That is no longer true. 

We started this blog less than a year ago, and we wish to give thanks to all of our readers for an interesting trip so far.  As we make the journey through life, it is good to stop and say thanks (I should more often than I do) and we say THANKS!!!!!!!

We have appreciated all of your ideas, feedback and suggestions for future themes and topics.  We are looking forward to 2010 and want to give everybody a great Christmas and we hope that the New Year is better for everyone (it may be hard to be worse).

MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 I have read several articles about the Department of Justice possibly looking into anti-trust concerns regarding the concentration of seed genetic traits by Monsanto.  Many experts believe that Monsanto uses their supplier contracts with other seed companies to unlawfully constrain competition in the seed industry.

Over the last 12 years, Monsanto has gone from having almost no seed business to a dominant position primarily due to their Roundup© Ready gene traits that they have licensed to hundreds of seed companies to use in marketing their seed.  These traits allow farmers to apply Roundup© directly without worrying about it killing their crop.  This can save substantial costs over having to spray on other chemicals at a later date or using less effective chemicals.

The Capital Press recently had an article on these practices.  I am not sure if I totally agree with the slant of the article especially when they talk about the price of seed corn going up by 25% last year.  Seed pricing has a very direct relationship to the overall price of corn since if you do not pay a market price, your grower will not grow seed corn, they will grow regular corn.  Therefore, since the average price of corn in 2008 was substantially higher than 2007, so seed corn should be much higher.

Also, I am not sure where you draw the line on letting a company enjoy the fruits of its patent versus being a monopoly.  The current patent system promotes the exclusive right to market and use your patent for a certain term of years.  This allows companies the ability to spend large amounts of money since they know that they will be able to recoup this money if they receive a patent.  Thus, they should be able to maximize this value during the limited years of the patent.  Monsanto will lose the patent in next 10 years or so and the market will be open to anybody that can make a generic and the price will drop at that time.

There is an overall limit as to how much Monsanto can charge since at some point it would become cheaper not use their seed if the price got too high.

I would be very interested to have feedback from our farmer clients as to whether you believe that Monsanto has an unfair competative advantage or if you are happy using these seeds and would not change.  Let us know!

The USDA just recently produced their Crop Production report for 2009.  Being a stats nut, I always like to look through the report.  This time, I thought I would share with you the total amount of food that the US produces in metric tons.  Lots of food items are counted in bushels, bales, tons, etc. but the USDA summarizes the major food catagories by metric tons.

The top ton food items by metric tons for 2009 are:

1. Corn                328 million
2. Hay                 139 million
3. Sileage corn    101 million (2008 numbers)
4. Soybeans          90 million
5. Wheat               60 million
6. Sugarbeets        27 million
7. Sugarcane        26 million
8. Potatos             20 million
9. Rice                  10 miilion
10. Sorghum           9 million

Total grain and hay production was about 655 million metric tons.  Total oilseed production was about 98 million metric tons.  Cotton, sugar products and potatos and related ended up at about 79 million totals.

Fruit products are much smaller than most of the grains, but here are the 5 largest fruit crops (in metric tons):

1. Oranges            8 million
2. Grapes              6 million
3. Apples               5 million
4. Grapefruit        1 million
5. Peaches            1 million

Total fruit production was about 24 million metric tons.

Overall food production for all products ended up at about 856 million metric tons.  If there are about 300 million people in the US, this equals production of about 3 metric tons or almost 7,000 pounds per person in the US.  We can see that a large portion of your production is exported.

Important Message to Readers

In the last few days, it has become apparent that I was not setting up the comments section for my postings.  In most cases, this probably means that you were either unable to make a comment or could not find where to comment or it was just too confusing to post a comment.

I believe that I have fixed this since I am now getting some comments.  I want to stress that I really like getting your comments since they help me decide what you as my readers feels is important or worthwhile to this site.

Please leave as many as you can or want.

I was at a local two hour seminar this morning on how the banking and real estate economies are doing.  Our area here is very much like most of my readers I am presuming.  It is very much agriculturally based and when the boom times in the housing market in 2002-2006 were going on, we were left behind.

However, when the major downturn came, we have not been affected too much yet.  Also, we have had a large amount of federal stimulus money put into the local economy and that seems to be holding up pretty well.  It is creating construction jobs and demand for new housing.

I am curious as to how the economy is in my reader’s area and would welcome any comments which will be posted on the site.

I just got back from spending about three days in Kansas City.  During my time there, I was able to get in about 6 hours of driving a John Deere 9660 combine.  It took until about noon for the soybeans to dry up enough to be able to harvest them.

I know when I was growing up that I thought of Kansas being perfectly flat.  However, the area around the Missouri river in the Kansas City area has many hills and the farm that I was harvesting on Monday was one of these hilly areas.  We kept the combine in first gear most of the afternoon and there were a couple of times where we had to kick  in the rear wheel assist to get the combine up the hill.

The beans looked very good for this field.  In normal years, the yield would probably be 30 bushels or less, but this year, the yield looked closer to 40 – 45 bushels per the yield monitor.

I also spent some time at the local cafe for breakfast and most of the farmers were looking forward to good yields for corn and beans this year, however, most of them joked that they would be combining corn after Christmas.  The weather report called for sunshine on Monday and Tuesday and of course, we woke up to a thunderstorm on Tuesday and no combining.

I think the current weather rally in beans, corn and wheat is a very good time to lock in some good prices for this year and next year’s crop. 

All in all, it was great to get to drive the combine, but also nice to get home.

I was reading  a good book by Mark Reiter called “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” .  Mark is a consultant to many Fortune 500 companies on how to get their key employees to overcome thier worst personailty traits.

In the book, Mark pinpoints 20 traits that almost all people in business and in life may have problems with.  From being too competitive to withholding information to speaking when angry, these traits can prevent someone from reaching their fullest potential.

Another area that Mark covers is the power of saying “thank you” and “I’m sorry”.  I grew up with a father who was about 46 when he got married and came from a large German farm family.  I know that my father was proud of me and loved to have me ride the combine as a child with him.  However, I never remember him saying “I’m sorry” or “Thank you” much, if at all.

I am working on trying to do this in the future with out be phony about it.  I think that if, as a farmer, you are able to say these two simple statements in every day life, I think you will find that you feel better and everybody else around you will respond in a happeir manner.  They will give you the extra effort that you may not be getting right now.

I would be interested in the feedback from anybody that gives it a try.

This is another one of my posts that is not directly related to farming.

When I was growing up on the farm, I was a great fan of Arnold Palmer in my very early days, however, when Tom Watson came on the scene I became a great fan of his.  He is from the Kansas City area and shows that great Mid-western humility and friendliness.

He is currently in first place at the British Open at the end of the third round.  If he wins tomorrow, he will be the oldest player to win a major by at least 10 years.  Also, I am not sure, but I have a feeling he is the oldest player to ever lead a major after the third round.

All I can say is GO TOM

At the Leading Edge Farm Conference held in Des Moines, Iowa this week, Drew Lerner of World Weather, Inc. gave a very informative talk on the current and future weather trends.

Some of the discussion focused on the Sun Spot activity over the last several hundred years.  In periods of lots of Sun Spot activity, you will normally see higher temperatures and with less activity, lower temperatures.  These cycles tend to repeat about every 12 years.  The peak Sun Spot activity was about 25 years ago and it usually takes about 25 years for this peak temperature to show up. 

Based on this, our temperature may have peaked last year and we may have lower temperatures over the next several years.

I think we need to remember that the Sun provides probably 99.99999999% of our heat and global warming may be more related to Sun Spot activity than mankind’s actions.

We shall see.

Also, based upon Drew’s analysis, we may have an El Nino effect coming on which might lead to lower temperatures and less rain in the corn belt this fall and winter.