Farm Industry Trends
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What Happens If Bonus Depreciation Runs Out?!
At the Top Producer Conference, I received several questions for my opinion regarding if Congress will extend bonus depreciation or if they will increase it from 50% to 100% for 2012. President Obama has already proposed increasing it to 100% for 2012, however, a more major issue is what happens if bonus depreciation stops? In reviewing […]
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Top Producer Seminar – Day Two
Wow, what an action packed day. First, breakfast was at 6 am to get the day started. At 7 am, we had the taping of the show for the US Farm Report to air this weekend. At 8:15, my breakout sessions started. Each one last 55 minutes and were back-to-back-to-back. I thought the last session […]
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Top Producer Seminar – First Day
The Top Producer Seminar started out today with a bang. Peter Zeihan with Stratfor Group gave an interesting presentation on the economic outlook in general and for ag. It was very interesting to see a map with an outline of the world’s river systems and how that has affected the world’s economy over the last […]
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Tomorrow’s Top Producer Recap
Today was the Tomorrow’s Top Producer at the Chicago Hilton. Several speakers gave great presentations on various subjects. Chris Barron of Carson and Barron Farms, Inc. gave a very interesting hour and half seminar on creating effective collaborations of multiple generations of farmers and farms. This collaboration does not utililize a formal partnership for the operation, but rather gets like […]
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See You in Chicago
On Monday, my wife and I will be traveling to Chicago for the Top Producer seminars that begin on Tuesday. Tuesday is set aside for the Tomorrow’s Top Producer and I will be speaking at a breakout session dealing with what is the right entity selection for a beginning Top Producer. The main Top Producer […]
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Don’t Forget SE Tax Changes for 2011 Tax Returns!
The Self-Employment (SE) tax rules for 2011 tax returns are different than the rules for 2010 tax returns, which were different than the rules for 2009 tax returns. The Job Creation Act of 2010 reduced the Social Security tax component of the SE tax from 12.4% to 10.4%, for 2011 only. Therefore, the SE tax rate […]
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Watch Out for FUTA and SUTA!
Many of our clients operate their farm operation as either an S or C corporation and in many cases the only employee of the corporation is the farmer and perhaps their spouse and children. Many of these farmers do not report any wages to them until the fourth quarter of the year. In these cases, […]
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Rural Mainstreet Index Remains Strong – But is it Topping Out?
Creighton University produces a Rural Main Street Index based upon a survey of rural bankers in six states, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming. The index ranges from 0 to 100. Anything over 50 is considered in an expansion mode. For January, the index rose to 59.8 from 59.7 in December which is […]
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Deferred Grain Sales Update
It is now apparent when I wrote my post last week on electing out of deferred sales contracts, that my terminology was not the best. Sometimes when writing these posts, I know what I mean but when transmitting the brain waves to the keyboard, it does not always get put down correctly. The correction on […]
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It’s All or None On Deferred Grain Sales
We had a reader ask the following question: “You previously wrote about electing out of deferred farm sales where the farmer could elect to include the income for a March delivery contract into the previous year to increase his taxable income in the previous year. I deferred my payment on my 2011 grain until 1/3/12. […]