Demographics
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Farm Financial Standards Council – Part 1
The annual conference for the FFSC got started this morning with a presentation by Dr. Tom Gillaspy a retired Minnesota State Demographer. He led off the presentation by stating that demographers are even more boring than accountants. I was almost insulted by this comment until I decided to consider it a compliment since he was fairly exciting. […]
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How Steep Is It!
This post is a continuation of my post from yesterday. The farm that I grew up on had hills with a fairly aggressive slope to them. The old 1960 era Hillside combines could level the combine on up to a 44 degree slope. There were two primary reasons to level the combine. First, it prevented […]
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Top Farmer – Day 2 – Last Session
The final session of the day was presented by Marcos Fava Neves of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil on the Brazilian Agriculture Perspective. Marcos is based near Sao Paulo which does not have much soybean or corn production in the area. Rather, they are in the heart of sugar cane country and Ethanol plants. Marcos […]
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Top Farmer – Day 2 Session 3
The next session was presented by Jason Henderson who just started with Purdue after being with the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He presented a series of maps showing farmland values from 1900 to the 1980s using constant current dollars. In 1900, there were no counties that had average farmland values exceeding $3,000. Some […]
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Ag Labor Employment Up in Washington
According to a recent Agricultural Labor Employment and Wages report compiled by the Employment Security Department (ESD), total agricultural employment for the state of Washington increased 8.7 percent from May 2012 to May 2013. Here are some other highlights: From April 2013 to May 2013, statewide total agricultural employment increased 4.2 percent South central Washington […]
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Remember, Corn is Not Just Grown in the Corn Belt
With today’s release of the USDA acreage report, it is becoming more apparent that the production of corn is rapidly expanding outside of the corn belt. North Dakota (3.9 million acres) for 2013 has almost planted as much acreage to corn as Ohio (3.95 million acres). My father was born in South Dakota and was […]
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My Trip to the Midwest
I flew into Kansas City on Thursday for three meetings on Friday with some of our farm clients. These meetings were productive, but the best part of the trip was on Saturday when I traveled from Kansas City to near Westboro, Missouri which is almost on the Iowa border. I met one of our farm […]
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Day 1 at Traverse City
I am in Traverse City yesterday and today putting on a joint farm tax update for about 65 CPAs with three other CPAs from around the country. Yesterday was an update on farm income tax planning and whenever I give a presentation like this I always worry about running out of things to say. As usual, […]
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Beginning Farmers Are Not Necessarily Young Farmers
The USDA in their Amber Wages April 1 issue had a very interesting article on the make-up of beginning farmers using 2011 data. I naturally assumed that most of these “beginning” farmers were less than 35 years of age. It turns out that this segment only comprises 14% of total beginning farmers. The largest segment […]
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Will This Time Be Different?
The Kansas City Federal Reserve just released a workpaper entitled “Farm Investment and Leverage Cycle: Will This Time Be Different?”. The article describes the four major farm cycles that have occurred since 1900. The first cycle begin in 1910 and ended in 1940. The First World War caused farm prices to rise dramatically which led […]