Farm Industry Trends
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Day Three of the Farm Trip
Yesterday I spent the day near Independence, Iowa with Chris Barron of Carson and Barrron Farms, Inc. Chris and his team of farmers farm about 7,000 acres along with a custom farming and seed sales business. I will write a later blog on what his team is doing. We spent most of the day moving […]
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My Rain Day
It seems as usual when I come to Kansas City for harvest I always bring the rain with me. Today is no exception and it appears I will spend it driving around checking out the flood damage. The goal is to get some combining in tomorrow up near Mason City, Iowa. I will keep you […]
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Watch Your Section 179 Deduction From Multiple Entities!
With the increased Section 179 deduction available in 2011 of $500,000 farmers need to be very careful if they have ownership in multiple partnerships and S corporations that will be purchasing large amounts of used equipment and deducting it under Section 179. The partnership and S corporation have an overall $500,000 Section 179 limitation on deducting at […]
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Senate Proposes Some Farm Tax Savings In Millionaire Tax Bill
The American Jobs Act introduced in the Senate last week (commonly known as the Millionaire Surtax Bill) contains some provisions that will help out our farmers. These are: Extend the 100% bonus depreciation until December 31, 2012. It is currently in place for all of 2011 and at 50% for 2012. This would make it […]
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If It Sounds To Good To Be True – It Usually Is!
Two recent Tax Court cases reinforce the old saying of “If it sounds to good to be true – It usually is”. In the cases, two relatively wealthy taxpayers consulted with a CPA at a Big 6 CPA firm and entered into transactions to convert a regular IRA with assets in excess of $1 million […]
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Gift of Farm Commodities
We had a reader ask the following question as a follow up to our post of gifts: “Please touch on one more aspect of gifting. Gifting grain and the tax owed by the recipient. Thanks, I enjoy your emails.” Cash method farmers have had many situations where the gifts of farm commodities to family members […]
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Program to Sniff Out Gift Tax Cheats!
It appears that the IRS is initiating a program to sniff out gift tax cheaters who are not properly filing their gift tax returns. The IRS estimates that between 60% and 90% of taxpayers who transfer real estate for little or no consideration to family members fail to file form 709 to report the gift. […]
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How Would You Like 16,958 Landlords?!
While perusing the Admission Document (similar to our initial public offering document and yes; CPAs do like to read these documents for fun) for Continental Farmers Group, PLC, I noticed that the company farms about 52,000 acres (20,840 hectares) in Western Ukraine. These 52,000 acres are covered by almost 17,000 individual leases (about 3 acres per […]
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What’s My Gift Limit?
We had a reader ask the following question: “Can i give a lot of shares in a family farm corporation to my kids gift tax exempt. Is this just a one time thing.” The subject of gifts can be misunderstood for many farmers. In general, you can give up to $13,000 (the annual exclusion amount) to […]
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You May Want to Unwind Your Roth Conversion
Many farmers elected in 2010 to convert their regular IRA to a Roth and either pay the tax in 2010 or spread it out over 2011 and 2012. As long as the farmer timely filed their income tax return or got an extension to October 15, 2011, they have until that date to “unwind” the conversion […]