Farm Leadership
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What if USDA Average Prices Occur?
The USDA has provided their long-term price outlook for the major crops over the next few years. Since ARC and PLC are both based upon what the average marketing price by crop year will be, I decided to run another analysis assuming that these prices occur. PLC has no yield variability, while ARC can be […]
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2012 Cattle Inventory
Most everyone knows that the cattle inventory numbers have been trending down for a few years now. The 2012 Ag Census confirms this. In 1997, there were 34.2 million cattle on hand. Over the next 15 years, this steadily dropped to a final 28.95 million cattle in 2012. As we can probably guess, the top state […]
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Management Accounting – Its Needed!
Dick Wittman of Wittman Consulting was one of the speakers last week at the AICPA Ag Conference. He spoke on both the need for management accounting in farm operations and then how to help farm families transition from one generation to the next and the need to appropriate communication. This communication is not just verbal feedback, […]
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AICPA Ag Conference
I was the chairperson for the 2014 AICPA Ag Conference held in Austin, Texas last week. One of the slogans that we constantly saw walking around Austin was “Keep Austin Weird” and I can tell you there are certainly some “weird” people walking around downtown Austin. We had about 200 people attend the conference and […]
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Payments to Veterinarians Require 1099 (Even If Incorporated)!
Most farmers are used to preparing form 1099s in January of each year for any unincorporated businesses that provide services to them during the year. Once those total payments exceed $600, the farmer is required to issue a form 1099-MISC. If the business providing the services is incorporated, then a form 1099 is normally not […]
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100 Million Not 10 Million
In my last post, I referenced a sample dairy farmer taking advantage of the Dairy Margin Dashboard put out by the University of Illinois. Since my eyes have gotten a little older, I missed the fact that my input was based on 100 million pounds, not 10 million pounds. Everything else is correct, other than […]
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Nice Dairy Margin Management Dashboard
The University of Illinois issues a daily “farmdoc” and today’s release was a nice dashboard for dairy farmers to determine how much margin protection they could have received if the margin protection program had been around since 2000. The dairy farmer can plug in their elected coverage levels; the amount of protection they want (from $4 […]
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Updated Average Marketing Prices 2013/14
The USDA releases updated prices on almost all major (and many minor) commodity crops at the end of each month. The latest report was released today. Since ARC will be based upon the average price received by farmers for their crop for the marketing year, we can take these monthly reports and obtain an average price […]
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Partial Taxpayer Victory on Horse Farm Case
In the Merrill C. Roberts cased just released by the Tax Court today, the taxpayer ended up with a partial victory in another horse farm case. Mr. Roberts, started a restaurant in 1969, had it burn down in several months after opening, and then used the insurance proceeds to open a bar in 1972. The […]
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Trusts, Capital Gains and the Net Investment Income Tax
As has been previously discussed in several posts, the highest tax rate for 2013 was raised from 35% to 39.5% and the highest capital gains tax was also raised from 15% to 20%. Obamacare also implemented a new complicated 3.8% surtax on net investment income in excess of certain thresholds. The thresholds are as follows […]