Ag Policy
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What Will be The February Insurance Price
February sets the price level for crop insurance on Corn, Beans and some of the other major crops. Last year’s spring price was $5.68 for corn and $12.55 for beans. We have had 4 trading days for this month out of 20 total and so far the average corn price is $5.89 and the average […]
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KC Fed Reports Drought-Reduced Income Boost Farm Loans
The Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank just released their third quarter Agricultural Credit Conditions report. The report indicated that the drought caused lower farm income for the quarter which caused farmers to increase their farm operating loans. Capital spending plummeted in the quarter. This could have been caused by the drought or perhaps the lower […]
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Some Interesting Ag Cooperative Facts
The USDA issues a bi-monthly newsletter on the Farm Cooperative industry and the latest issue had some interesting facts: Minnesota has the highest number of coops (a distinction held since 1900) with 203. Texas is second with 187 followed by North Dakota and California. These numbers are based upon the number of Coops with headquarters […]
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Will There Be An “Agriculture Abyss”?
The Economist Magazine based in England writes several good articles a year on items related to farming. They just recently posted an article dealing with the farm bill making its way through Congress. Most farmers know that the Farm Bill has technically expired as of September 30, 2012, but many probably do not know that we […]
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ObamaCare Here To Stay (At least 4 more years)
I spent three of the last four days giving a seminar on the economic and tax effects of ObamaCare in Yakima, Kennewick and Boise and it was interesting to hear the feedback from farmers and other business owners. The first two days, the audience wanted to know my opinion on what would happen if Romney […]
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Updated Harvest Prices
Although the final corn and bean harvest prices have not been officially revealed, the University of Illinois in their FarmDoc daily blog, just released their final harvest estimate. Back on October 11, I posted a guess of the final corn price being $7.55 per bushel. FarmDoc indicates a final price of $7.50 (I was a […]
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Is This Farm Boom Different?!
The Kansas City Federal Reserve just released an issue of their Main Street Economist report that summarized their 2012 Agricultural Symposium held in July. We had previously done a quick post on this, but the latest issue does an extremely good job of summarizing the data presented at the Symposium. History does seem to repeat […]
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Does The Fiscal Cliff Really Make Drastic Cuts in Spending?
It seems every time I turn the TV to a national news channel that someone is always talking about how drastic the spending cuts will be if the Fiscal Cliff goes into effect on January 1, 2013. I have always wondered what that reduction in spending would be and I ran across a study from […]
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Crop Revenue Would Need To Drop 21.4% to Equal 1980 Income Shock
The Kansas City Federal Reserve just issued a paper on the Nebraska economy and I found a couple of the pages in the paper interesting. First, to equal a 1980s income shock, current farm revenue would need to drop by 21.4% and the value of total farm production would need to decrease by 15.7%. Now 21.7% […]
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IRS Extends Drought Replacement Period for Ranchers
The IRS announced today in Release 2012-72 that they have extended the period for replacing livestock sold due to drought for another year. Normally, if a rancher is forced to sell their breeding, draft or dairy livestock due to drought, any extra sales caused by drought is allowed to be deferred for up to four years. This […]