Farm Industry Trends
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Might Not Pay To Do An Equipment Trade-In!
Most farmers automatically assume that it is always better to trade-in their farm equipment to save on income taxes. However, for 2011, if your total farm equipment purchases is going to be less than $500,000, then in most cases it would almost always be better to sell your farm equipment for cash and then buy equipment […]
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Executive Women in Agriculture Conference – Recap
After a long flight home Friday night, I have had a couple of days to reflect on the the First Annual Conference for Executive Women in Agriculture and here are my conclusions: American Agribusiness should be proud of the women who are active in running a farm or an agribusiness. Based upon the women that […]
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Executive Women in Agriculture – Day 1
I was an attendee at the First Annual Top Producer conference for Executive Women in Agriculture in Chicago. There were well over 100 women executives in attendance and the speakers lined up for today were outstanding. American agriculture is well represented by these woman executives and I look forward to more getting involved in the […]
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Watch Your Beneficiary!
I think we may have written a post on this a couple of years ago, but I got reminded of the issue a couple of days ago with another sad situation that was relayed to me. I was talking with one of my CPA friends and he had a client whose husband had just passed […]
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New Tax Education Program for Farmers
The USDA-Risk Management Agency (RMA) in conjunction with several Universities has just announced a new site for financial and tax information for farmers. The site is located at www.ruraltax.org. The site is comprised of: Tax Topics Sample Farm Tax Return Small Farm Tax Guide Links Plus some information on who has contributed to the site and […]
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Should You Switch Your LIBOR Debt?
With the Euro Zone upheaval in the financial markets, farmers may want to consider changing any LIBOR based debt that they currently have or anticipate having in the future. Almost all loans these days are based upon some type of index. The most common ones are the Prime Rate, LIBOR and some type of US […]
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Tri State Grain Growers Convention
We have a booth at the Tri State Grain Convention in Spokane, through Friday of this week. We set up the booth yesterday afternoon and had several people stop by. If any of our readers from Washington, Idaho and Oregon are attending the convention, please stop by and say Hi.
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Sustainability Test – Part 3
Today’s post is our last part of the sustainability test. Although this is designed for all businesses, most of all of these items apply to farms too. If a key manager or administrator suddenly became incapacitated, someone other than the owner/CEO could assume his or her duties within a week. Have you done a good […]
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Sustainability Test – Part 2
We continue our sustainability test from yesterday. Our company can withstand the financial impact of a “bad” job or lower than anticipated revenue and still comfortably absorb overhead expenses. Do you stress test your budget each year to see what your break-even point is? Have you locked in enough revenues to cover overhead costs including […]
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Sustainability Test – Part 1
A reader gave me a 10 part questionaire regarding how sustainable your business is. This questionaire applies as much to farming as to any other business. During this week, I will list the questions here with my comments. If you can get a true response on at least 7 questions, I would say your farm […]