Farm Industry Trends
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Rural Broadband – Catching up to Urban Broadband?
Sort of like the photo of my motorcycle at the left, broadband Internet services are much faster than dial up (or in my case a Harley). Historically, the utilization of broadband Internet services in the rural sector has been much lower than urban areas. In an article in the September, 2009 Amber Waves , several […]
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Farm Debt Levels Are Increasing
All in all, farm debt levels have increased, however, farmers have done a very good job of not letting these levels get out of control. The United States Department of Agriculture has a very good print and online magazine called Amber Waves. Each issue generally has several good articles related to farming and I would […]
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Top-Third vs. Bottom-Third
The Kansas State University Department of Agricultural Economics periodically produces a recap of the high 1/3, mid 1/3 and low 1/3 of various farms in their state. They just released the latest analysis for corn, sorghum, wheat, soybeans and alfalfa for the three years 2006-2008. The total number of crop farms reporting for all three […]
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Does Your Banker Understand Hedging
For a farmer to be successful in using a hedging strategy, they must have an agricultural lender that understands and promotes hedging. Many lenders are willing to finance margin accounts for bonafide hedgers since they understand that the farmer is reducing their exposure to pricing risk. Some will also lend a larger percentage of the […]
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End of Year Reflections
The idea for this blog was a glimmer in my mind at the end of 2008. While surfing on the web, I found the Golden Practices web-site that listed different industry specific blogs. This spurred me to action and with their help, we had a fully up and running blog site in the first quarter […]
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Monsanto = Monopoly?????
I have read several articles about the Department of Justice possibly looking into anti-trust concerns regarding the concentration of seed genetic traits by Monsanto. Many experts believe that Monsanto uses their supplier contracts with other seed companies to unlawfully constrain competition in the seed industry. Over the last 12 years, Monsanto has gone from having almost […]
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Corn Harvest is Not Done
I was traveling over the last couple of days to the Mid-West. I spent part of my time driving from Kansas City to Davenport, Iowa and then from there to Hannibal, Missouri and then back to Kansas City. While on this trip, I noticed that there was still a lot of corn that was not […]
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Will the Dairy Price Incease Save the Farmers in Time
The National Agricultural Bankers Conference is meeting in San Antonio, Texas this week. Marcia Zarley from DTN/The Progressive Farmer has a good overview of what the bankers are talking about. Farmers who are in the dairy and pork industry are really feeling the pinch of low milk and pork prices right now. Many of the […]
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Farmland Values Hold Steady, But Credit Conditions are Deteriorating
After two years of steep increases, it appears that farmland values are either flattening out or starting to drop, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. For example, Nebraska farmland values fell in the third quarter compared to a the third quarter of 2008 by about 5%. The regional change was slightly lower […]
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5 + 5 + 5 = Home Run
Many farmers do a good job of benchmarking their operations to other operations in the same state of region. By doing this benchmarking, they are able to see where they are either behind or ahead of other farmers. Some get discouraged trying to get out of the middle range into the top 20%. Most think […]