Farm Leadership
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What is your plan?
I just finished up attending a two day seminar in our Minneapolis office with our company wide Agribusiness and Cooperative group. There is a ton of talent assembled in this group and it was great to get to know them better. As I was attending one of the discussions I got a text with updated […]
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With Low Interest Rates, Special Use Valuation May Not Save Much Estate Tax
With the explosive increase in cash rents and the continued decrease of interest rates, the savings by electing special use valuation for estate tax purposes may not be available in 2012. One of the special estate tax provisions for farmers is the option to elect to reduce the value of the estate to reflect the […]
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Watch Out For State Taxes!
In my home state of Washington, we have an excise tax for any real estate sales that take place during the year. This tax is usually close to a 2% rate on the gross sales price. For a sale of $1 million of real estate, your excise tax liability is about $20,000. Many taxpayers had created […]
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Food for Thought on Ag Yields
We had a reader respond to our last post on US rarely being #1 in yields that I thought I would share with you: “Really interesting post. Something that jumped out at me was the need to keep in mind the spatial context of these numbers. Lets take Chile and Jordan corn production for example. […]
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US is Rarely #1 in Yields
I think it is fairly common for us as Americans to assume that our agricultural production leads the world in yields. But when you review the average yields by variety, in many cases, the US does not even make the top 5 for yield. Part of this may be due to smaller countries using irrigation […]
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Present is Better Than Future!
Many farmers have created limited partnerships or limited liability companies (LLC) to hold their farmland. As part of this process, gifts are made to children and grandchildren for estate planning purposes. For 2012, each person can give $13,000 (most likely rising to $14,000 in 2013) to as many people as they want and not have this gift counted […]
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FSA Overpaid $28 Million in Sure Claims in 2011
The Office of the Inspector General released a May audit of USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) assistance programs, estimating that about $28 million in FSA payments were improperly distributed during fiscal year 2011. The Office sampled 122 payments totaling $5.2 million. 14 errors were identified, 10 of which were SURE payments. Many of the errors […]
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Another Large Charitable Donation Gets Thrown Out!
We have done a couple of posts on the requirements for reporting charitable donations, whether in cash or non-cash. The penalty for not documenting these donations properly is, in most cases, a complete dis-allowance of the deduction. Now, we have another Tax Court case showing the folly of a “sophisticated” taxpayer not following the instructions […]
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MF Global Recovery at 72% and Should Exceed 92%
It appears that most of the MF Global customers have received about 72% of their claims to date. When a large company such as MF Global enters bankruptcy, there is an active market in buying and selling these claims. Many hedge funds will purchase these claims with the expectation of making a profit when the […]
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Free Money Not Taken
The GAO just reported that for the 2010 tax year 170,300 small employers claimed the small employer insurance tax credit, but the number of eligible small businesses that could have taken the credit ranged from 1.4 million to 4 million. The average credit claimed was about $2,700. According to a Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), […]