Farm-News

1 week ago | farm-news.com | Alan Guebert

Somewhere along life’s highway most of us learned to balance a checkbook. This task usually involved a pencil, the back of a used envelope, and some basic math. Today, however, a click or two in a second or two delivers that up-to-the-second number. It’s the same for the federal government’s checkbook; a click or two takes you inside the nation’s ledger courtesy of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

3 weeks ago | farm-news.com | Alan Guebert

Longtime readers of this weekly effort may recall my affection for the word “woodenheadedness.” It comes from “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman’s 1984 book about “the pervasive presence … of failure, mismanagement, and delusion in government.” In Tuchman’s telling, history is filled with “the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests despite the availability of feasible alternatives.” For example, this contrariness — or as she often refers to it, “woodenheadedness”...

3 weeks ago | farm-news.com | Darcy Maulsby

DES MOINES — What separates professionally-managed farms from farms that struggle or fail? The successful farms begin with the end in mind and have a strategy for success. “How many times do you get to practice farm succession? Once,” said Dick Wittman, an Idaho rancher and farm management consultant who led a day-long workshop during Commstock Investments’ Family Farm Masterclass in Des Moines earlier this year.

1 month ago | farm-news.com | Alan Guebert

Family lore has it that sometime in the pre-refrigeration days of the late 19th century, my forefathers dug a small cave into a steep hillside on their adjacent farms to store several barrels of home-brewed beer. Like the family’s suds, the cave was cool, dark, and prized. This being southern Illinois, however, a minor earthquake one day sent the roof of the underground rathskeller onto the barrels of beer and soon their hoppy contents were flowing into the nearby creek.

1 month ago | farm-news.com | Alan Guebert

In the seven weeks that global markets and U.S. farmers have been living in the uncertain trade world of the Trump Administration, prices for most American ag exports have headed south faster than a Canada goose in late October. In fact, futures prices for most key ag markets — soybeans, corn, cotton, wheat, and pork — are five to eight percent lower than when the president first spun his trade roulette wheel in February.