According to the latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the average size of farm operating loans in the fourth quarter reached record levels. The volume of non-real estate farm debt continued to increase in the fourth quarter of 2018. The increase was driven by growth in operating loans, which reached a […]
A Bloomberg headline caught my attention this morning: U.S. Growth Engine Looks Able to Power Past Stock Market’s Woes. Reporter Christopher Condon noted that although stocks have taken a beating in recent weeks, economists are by and large unconcerned about what broader financial indicators say about prospects for continued growth in the U.S. economy. To put […]
A couple of years back a Gallup release about employee engagement left me dumbstruck: in the firm’s survey of worker sentiment, for the first six months of 2015, engagement figures hovered steadily between 31.5% and 31.9%. What was almost more sobering was that only 40.4% of managers reported feeling engaged in their jobs. In other words, […]
One of the first sales trainers I ever heard speak on the subject put it this way: “No one ever says ‘I want to be a salesman when I grow up.’” Apologies to the speaker, because I can’t recall who it was that said it (it was probably an author named Chris Lytle, come to […]
There are just 11 weeks left in 2018. In other words, 78.9% of the year is already over. Done. Gone. That is time we will never get back. …and really, when you factor in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, we’re really talking about 10 weeks of business left to do this calendar year. […]
Soybean prices are as low as they’ve been in a decade, and corn prices aren’t any better. Last week I delivered a presentation on the topic of agricultural trade in the Trump Era to farmers in Northeastern Montana, and the theme I hammered was the role uncertainty plays in the markets, and how President Trump’s […]
Farmers deal with a great deal of uncertainty by the very nature of their business. Will it rain? Will prices go up or down? Will pests or diseases destroy my crop? The combined forces of agronomic, meteorological and economic uncertainty are no doubt factors in the declining number of farmers in the U.S., and the […]
It’s not much of an elevator speech, but distilled to a single sentence, I sell advertising for a living. I’ve been involved in the profession of sales in one way or another for at least 10 of my 16-plus years in agribusiness media, and it is both one of the most challenging and most rewarding […]
A number of anti-Monsanto, anti-biotech groups and activists have pushed the notion that consumers “have the right to know” if the food they consume contains ingredients from genetically-modified crops. For the most part the agriculture industry – minus some, but not necessarily all, organic producers and groups – have opposed this concept based on the […]
Some weeks ago I read a brilliant New York Times Magazine essay on Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis, the retired Marine General tasked with, as the essayist put it, holding the line in President Donald Trump’s “War Cabinet.” I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for stories about great leaders in general, and generals in specific (Patton […]
