Ag Policy
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Is Crop Insurance Values That Much Lower Than Last 10 Years
Expanding on our previous post, I decided to work up a table showing the insurance values over the last 10 years plus an estimate for this year. I based it on an APH for 2015 of 185 with a 2 bpa adjustment for each year going back. Below is the chart showing these values for […]
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Lowest Spring Crop Insurance Price in Last 10 Years?
February is the month for determining the final “spring” discovery price for crop insurance purposes. This year is shaping up to the be the lowest insurance price for the last 10 years. From 2007 to 2015, the lowest corn spring insurance price was $3.99 in 2014, $4.04 in 2009 and $4.06 in 2007. Last year […]
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Does Cottonseed Oil Qualify for Other Oilseed Treatment Under 2014 Farm Bill
The USDA just announced that they will not include cottonseed as an oilseed. The cotton industry and other farm groups have been lobbying USDA to include this as an other oilseed and likely then allow cotton growers to elect PLC on these acres and receive a payment at least for the next few years assuming […]
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Continued Headwinds for Ag
The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City provides several publications throughout the year on trends in the farming sector for their region (Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico). In an article titled “Supply and Demand Fundamentals Weighing on Ag Economy”, it does a good job of outlining the headwinds that Ag still […]
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Iowa Land Values Drop 3.9% from 2014
Iowa State University has performed a survey of Iowa land values since 1941. Nominal land values peaked in 2013 and for 2015, the values decreased by $310 to an average $7,633 per acre or drop of 3.9%. Iowa is split into 9 zones, 3 along the top part of the state, 3 in the middle […]
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Inflation-Indexed Child Tax Credit Stymies Extender Bill
The tax extenders bill working its way through Congress continues to be stymied by a fight over indexing the child tax credit to inflation. Republicans in both chambers oppose this, but House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is driving this position and does not appear to want to back down. Pelosi believes that the Democrats have […]
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FAFSA Reporting Changes
I get many phone calls during the year regarding the reporting of income tax data for FAFSA purposes in order for a child to get financial aid. Many times these phones calls lead to heartburn for both the client and myself. The parent wants to get the data into the college as soon as possible to pin […]
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Possible ARC-CO Recalculations
As discussed in our webinars on the farm bill last year and earlier this year, farmers who signed up for ARC-CO (County) would have payments made based upon what county the FSA administered your farm not the county where the farm was located (if different). This could result in differences between payment amounts and the […]
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Health Co-Ops are NOT Cooperatives
Some of you may have read or heard about some of the struggling government-funded non-profit insurers (created out of the Affordable Care Act) that journalists continue to incorrectly refer to as “co-ops,” short for cooperatives, rather than using the uppercase acronym CO-OP, which stands for Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans. While some of these non-profit […]
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2015 ARC-CO Payment Estimator
Final 2014 crop information has been posted by the FSA and in our previous post we have recapped some of the analysis of that data. In order to calculate estimated 2015 crop ARC-CO payment projections, we need the final yield per acre that was provided. Since we now have that data, we have worked up […]