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Autopsy on Wall Street's "Big Short"
Wed Sep 8, 2010 09:06 AM CDT
This month marks the second anniversary of the Wall Street meltdown that very nearly bankrupted the global financial system and triggered untolled human and economic carnage in its wake. I don't need to recount the misery wrought by the Great Recession, but I will admit that I didn't truly grasp the sheer depravity of the subprime mortgage crisis until reading author Michael Lewis's latest book, "The Big Short."
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More Quick Fixes for Disaster Program
Tue Sep 7, 2010 04:49 PM CDT
Delivering disaster aid when farmers need it should be a priority of federal emergency aid. But the first-year experiment with the Supplemental Revenue Assistance program (SURE for short) hasn't accelerated the process, some farmers say, and it's led to administrative headaches for Farm Service Agency offices that Congress may have underestimated.
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Why SURE Showers Disaster Aid
Tue Aug 31, 2010 09:27 AM CDT
Recently I reported that the permanent farm disaster aid program made princes and paupers out of farmers in states struck by farm revenue losses when it first launched for the 2008 crop last January. SURE, the Supplemental Revenue Assistance program, rewarded some growers with maximum $100,000 payments while others with equally legitimate losses collected zero because of technical glitches.
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Cash Rent on a Binge
Fri Aug 20, 2010 09:58 AM CDT
The hangover of 2008's commodity price binge remains with us, even though the party of $13 wheat and $8 corn is long gone. That was the thrust of this week's DTN staff series, "The Cash Rent Hangover," and it's worth a little more discussion about what farmers can do about it now that 2011's cash rent negotiation season is gearing up.
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Redefining Farm Size
Mon Aug 16, 2010 03:49 PM CDT
A decade ago, a 10,000-acre farm was considered "big." But as DTN South America Correspondent Kieran Gartlan reported in his "South America Calling" blog last week, Brazil now boasts corporate megafarms that would dwarf the biggest of the U.S.
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Map the Farm Disaster Money
Wed Aug 11, 2010 11:13 AM CDT
Some farmers in the Upper Midwest don't remember they experienced a disaster in 2010, but in many cases growers received the maximum $100,000 SURE disaster payments anyway, thanks largely to an all-time record drop between spring futures prices and fall harvest.
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SURE Disaster Payments Make Princes and Paupers
Mon Aug 9, 2010 04:40 PM CDT
Iowa farmer Roger Berg expects to be $60,593 poorer soon, once he receives the official letter. That's because the Farm Service Agency has indicated it overpaid his 2008 farm disaster payments when it issued him a check last February.
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Corn Belt Still Suffers from 2008 Hangover
Tue Aug 3, 2010 04:58 PM CDT
At $3.50 corn and $210 cash rent in 2010, average central Illinois farmers would make about $45 per acre profit, smaller than their margins pre-2007, according to Gary Schnitkey at University of Illinois.
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Farm Program a Disaster in Progress
Mon Aug 2, 2010 10:50 AM CDT
When Congress wrote what rational people would consider the most complex formula yet for farm disaster aid in the 2008 Farm Act, it was supposed to (1) be a fairer system; (2) compensate people who'd experienced whole farm revenue loss, not a yield loss on a single crop as past farm programs did; (3) pay higher rates to those with better crop insurance coverage.
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Time is Ticking on Tax Time Bomb
Sun Jul 18, 2010 08:46 PM CDT
Given sizable tax increases on dividends and capital gains starting in 2011, you may want to schedule an appointment with your tax adviser extra early this year. Taking action now is especially important if you have a C corporation that's been accumulating dividends instead of paying them, DTN Tax Columnist Andy Biebl emphasized in his "Ask the Taxman" article this week.
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Stampede to Refinance
Thu Jul 15, 2010 03:06 PM CDT
Farmers know a deal when they see it: The surprise collapse in mortgage interest rates the past few weeks has triggered another wave of refinancing at Farm Credit System lenders. And that's helping growers build a stronger line of defense for the day when the Federal Reserve eventually reverses course and today's cheap credit returns to normal.
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Can Estate Tax Reform Save the Last Farm?
Mon Jul 12, 2010 05:10 PM CDT
I chatted with the last dairy farmer on Long Island while on vacation there last week. It wasn't milk prices or robotics or immigration policy troubling him like it is back in the Midwest. Because he farms in the most expensive zip code in the United States, it was estate taxes.
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Guilty on Fuel Buys?
Mon Jun 28, 2010 06:05 PM CDT
I spent much of the past month on jury duty for a murder trial, locked in a Camden County, New Jersey court house, guarded by sheriff deputies and deprived of my Blackberry. While I had a good excuse for missing the earlier-than-normal, 23 percentseasonal dip in the diesel prices in the month of May, I hope you smart shoppers have taken the opportunity to lock in at least some of your fall diesel needs when heating oil futures floated in the $2 and under range.
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What's Wrong With ACRE?
Thu Jun 24, 2010 04:14 PM CDT
Low signup for the Average Crop Revenue Election program--ACRE for short--has disappointed policymakers: Only about 129,000 farms enrolled in the program after the first two signups, while 1.54 million stuck with traditional countercyclical programs.
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VIP Farms Tilt Global Grain Markets
Tue Jun 15, 2010 10:45 PM CDT
Giant farming companies--those with 250,000 acre scale and up--may be a new phenomenon to us, but they already are changing the competitiveness of global agriculture. Whether such scale can succeed here is still a big question, but it's becoming the norm in the former Soviet Union, Brazil and Argentina.
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In Former Soviet Union, Converting Capitalists is Harder Than We Think
Fri Jun 4, 2010 04:24 PM CDT
More than 20 years has passed since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and its agricultural development remains one of the greatest missed opportunities in world history. Despite possession of some of the earth's best soils, a critical shortage of entrepreneurs, infrastructure and a pro-business culture continue to impair farm production there.
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Investors Seek Safe Haven in Farmland
Thu May 20, 2010 04:49 PM CDT
It should be no shock that the stock market's irrational 1,000-point swings could steer more investors to once boring fields like farm real estate. I saw plenty of enthusiasm at a recent Global Ag Investing conference I attended in New York.
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Aren't Farm Programs Worthless Anyway?
Wed May 19, 2010 04:12 PM CDT
An outstanding Mid-South grower I know thinks he can go cold turkey on farm programs, so little relevance do loan rates have on his cost of production. He's zeroed out his cotton acres, growing all corn and soybeans now, at least until he's sure there's a long life for the cotton industry here.
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Think of ACRE as a Cheap Option
Fri May 14, 2010 10:42 AM CDT
During the first of two online webinars today, Kansas State University economists Art Barnaby and Troy Dumler offered some tremendous insights on how to view your ACRE (Average Crop Revenue Election) decision.
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Ask the ACRE Specialists
Wed May 12, 2010 05:23 PM CDT
I know academics don't all have "skin" in the game like you real farmers, but most land grant university economists who've put the Average Crop Revenue Election program under the microscope conclude that you get a lot of protection for the money when you enroll.
