Demographics
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Frozen Garbanzo Beans to Hit the Market This Year
I grew up in the Walla Walla area and several farmers are now producing Garbanzo Beans on about a 1,000 acres for the fresh frozen market. Normally, garbanzo beans are held to maturity and harvested dry and then shipped around the world. The Middle East is a large consumer of these beans and in the US they are primarily used […]
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John Deere to Fight For GPS
USA Today just ran an article on how John Deere is leading the fight against Lightsquared plans to put up more than 40,000 new cell towers in rural America. John Deere is worried that the spectrum that Lightsquared want to use will bump the GPS spectrum and lead to farmers having issues running their GPS […]
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Batman Was A Farmer!
I grew up on a wheat farm near Walla Walla, Washington and one of my next door neighbors was Batman, Adam West that is. As a young child, one of my favorite shows growing up was Batman (however, as I got older, the show got a little cheesier). Adam West, who was Batman, grew up […]
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Wheat Market Update with a Northwest Bent
The Northwest Farm Credit Services has just posted a nice four page summary of winter and spring wheat conditions in the Pacific Northwest. This growing region includes Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. The region has been especially cool and wet this spring with most typical harvest delays of at least two weeks. Stripe rust appears […]
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Estimate Your Monthly Social Security Benefit
The Social Security Administration has a nice retirement calculator on their website that will project what your monthly social security benefit will be if you retire at: Normal retirement age (for most of us this will be somewhere between age 66 and 67), Age 70, and Age 62 The calculator takes into account your current […]
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What’s Your RLU?
A farm enterprise must be able to generate enough revenue and net income to support at least one farm family which I call a “living unit”. A farm operation should calculate how much revenue the farm generates each year and divide that both by the number of full-time equivalent employees (FTE) and “living units”. To […]
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Report From The Heartland
I have spent most of the time since Saturday in Kansas City, Minneapolis and Fargo. I have seen a lot of water, both in overflowing rivers and standing in the fields. Our 200+ acres of corn north of Kansas City looks great but my farm partner will most likely lose 400 or mores acres due […]
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Ethanol Industry Will Still Be Vibrant Without Tax Credits
Todd Becker, CEO of Omaha-based ethanol producer Green Plains, says ethanol “is still a great fuel” according to an article in the Omaha World-Herald. Ethanol allows for a reduction in demand for foreign oil and is a cleaner burning fuel. At current production rates, ethanol provides more motor fuel for the United States than it […]
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Golf Course Falls Victim to High Grain Prices
The new owner of the Whittemore Golf Course in Algona, Iowa has plowed it under to put in a corn crop for this year. This nine hole course was originally built in 1969. The new buyer decided that it would make more money as a farm than as a golf course. This has caused some rift […]
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Tidbits From The Kansas City Fed – Part 2
Following our theme of providing tidbits from the Kansas City Fed Report: Milk producers have had at least three plus years of unprofitable operations. The Fed estimated that the average US dairy lost $4 dollars per hundredweight in 2006, made about 50 cents in 2007 and the lost $11, $7 and $4 for 2008-2010. On […]