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Does Warren Buffett Practice What He Preaches?
President Obama sometimes refers to the Buffett Surtax when promoting a new budget or tax law changes. This surtax refers to the famous Omaha investor (Warren Buffet) who talks about volunteering his willingness to pay a higher income tax rate than the current law provides for. However, much of Warren’s wealth is not current income […]
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State Estate Tax – 2014 Update
Many states have either completely repealed their state estate tax or they have an estate tax that is tied to the old federal state estate tax credit. Since the federal law changed many years back to repeal the state tax credit, all of those states that relied upon receiving the state tax credit amount really […]
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The Long-Term Trend in Hog Numbers
We recently reviewed the trend in cattle numbers based on the 2012 census. Those numbers show a decrease in cattle numbers and we had assumed that hog numbers would actually show a small increase in numbers due to the recent profitability numbers for hogs. However, since the last census was in 2007 which was before […]
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Farm Income and Land Values Continue to “Soften”
We periodically recap some of the surveys done by the Kansas City Federal Reserve. Their region comprises one of the major corn belt states (Nebraska) along with Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and the Mountain States. The survey released on May 15 recapped the responses of Ag bankers in the district. These bankers reported lower farm income […]
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What if USDA Average Prices Occur?
The USDA has provided their long-term price outlook for the major crops over the next few years. Since ARC and PLC are both based upon what the average marketing price by crop year will be, I decided to run another analysis assuming that these prices occur. PLC has no yield variability, while ARC can be […]
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2012 Cattle Inventory
Most everyone knows that the cattle inventory numbers have been trending down for a few years now. The 2012 Ag Census confirms this. In 1997, there were 34.2 million cattle on hand. Over the next 15 years, this steadily dropped to a final 28.95 million cattle in 2012. As we can probably guess, the top state […]
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The 2012 Billion Dollar Counties
I had previously posted on the 2007 Ag Census for those counties in the US that exceeded $1 billion in annual farm sales. In that census, there were 20 counties in the US with sales in excess of $1 billion and almost all of them were in California. Six other states had counties in excess […]
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Management Accounting – Its Needed!
Dick Wittman of Wittman Consulting was one of the speakers last week at the AICPA Ag Conference. He spoke on both the need for management accounting in farm operations and then how to help farm families transition from one generation to the next and the need to appropriate communication. This communication is not just verbal feedback, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
