The Business of Agriculture Podcast

Can changing your business change your profitability? Certainly.  Yet, plenty of farmers and agribusinesses don't know whether they made money until they file their taxes. By then it's too late to act. Alex Locklear, CEO of Good Agriculture, joins Damian to talk about running a farm or ag business like an actual business. That means: finding which enterprise, field or farm is losing money, modeling a decision before you spend the money, and making time to act on what you already know. Alex covers the three biggest mistakes she sees: the sunk cost fallacy, spending money just to avoid paying taxes, and not getting a second opinion. She and Damian also cover smart diversification, family farms where the next generation can't get a say, and the myth that agriculture is unlike any other business. Bad weather and market prices don't make farming special. Running it like a business does.
 
The Business of Agriculture with Damian Mason is brought to you by:
Heads Up Plant Protectants
Tidal Grow Agriscience
Nano-Yield 
Good Agriculture
Also, make sure to check out my new show Uprooted, DamianMason.com, XtremeAg's The Cutting The Curve Podcast and The Granary. 
 
 
This content is protected. ©Damian Mason, all rights reserved.

Input costs are sky-high, commodity prices are low, and another $8 billion in aid just hit the Farm Belt. Can American agriculture stand on its own? Alicia Mooney who, along with her husband, farms 7,000 acres in northeast Arkansas and keeps the books for thousands more, joins Damian from one of the hardest-hit farm states. They dig into why input prices stay high when the government keeps farmers afloat, why emergency aid has replaced real planning, and how other countries' subsidies tilt the global playing field. Then they look ahead. Can new markets and more domestic demand reduce the need for support? Will future subsidies come with environmental strings attached? And with the national debt piling up, how long can the payments last? As Alicia puts it, "I don't want to have to pencil a government payment into my projection for my banker." Political and budgetary pressure on farm subsidies is coming eventually. Is American Agriculture prepared?
 
The Business of Agriculture with Damian Mason is brought to you by:
Heads Up Plant Protectants
Tidal Grow Agriscience
Nano-Yield 
Also, make sure to check out my new show Uprooted, DamianMason.com, XtremeAg's The Cutting The Curve Podcast and The Granary. 
 
 
This content is protected. ©Damian Mason, all rights reserved.

Farm debt is at a record $605 billion, and that may not be the whole picture. More farm credit now comes from equipment companies, input suppliers, co-ops and private lenders, and that debt is hard to measure. Dr. Jenny Ifft, agricultural economist at Kansas State University, is working with USDA to size it up. She joins Damian to explain why vendors have become lenders and why "0% financing" is never really free. Is farm debt a problem? Balance sheets still look healthy. The real risk is cash flow, with many mid-sized grain farms barely covering their debt payments. Damian and Jenny weigh the warning signs, the lessons of the 1980s, and the flip side: plenty of capital is looking for somewhere to go — maybe farm debt is a non-issue, especially when compared to Main Street America's debt load. Farmers: Jenny is collecting seed price sheets for her research. Email a photo of your seed price sheets to jifft@ksu.edu.
The Business of Agriculture with Damian Mason is brought to you by:
Heads Up Plant Protectants
Tidal Grow Agriscience
Nano-Yield 
Good Agriculture
Also, make sure to check out my new show Uprooted, DamianMason.com, XtremeAg's The Cutting The Curve Podcast and The Granary. 
 
 
This content is protected. ©Damian Mason, all rights reserved.

Baby Boomers hold more than half of America's household wealth, while many younger people see owning a home, let alone a farm, as out of reach. Is today's generational rift worse than in decades past? Vance Crowe, founder of Legacy Interviews, joins Damian to dig into what's driving the divide: inflation that rewards asset owners and leaves renters behind, the soaring cost of college, and farm programs that send the most money to those who already own the most land. So what does it mean for agriculture? Damian and Vance push back on policies that create special classes by age, from young-farmer incentives to property tax freezes for seniors, and look ahead to what happens when a massive amount of farmland changes hands. They end on realism and optimism: if the direct path into farming doesn't work for you right now, find another route. If this one hits home, share it with someone who'd benefit.
The Business of Agriculture with Damian Mason is brought to you by:
Heads Up Plant Protectants
Tidal Grow Agriscience
Nano-Yield 
Good Agriculture
Also, make sure to check out my new show Uprooted, DamianMason.com, XtremeAg's The Cutting The Curve Podcast and The Granary. 
 
 
This content is protected. ©Damian Mason, all rights reserved.

Thousands of new companies have flooded the crop input market with products in the last decade.  All promise farmers a better answer. So who survives the shakeout? Galynn Beer with Tidal Grow Agriscience joins Damian to sort through one of the most crowded input markets agriculture has ever seen. They cover how the biologicals boom brought a wave of investor money, why some products solve problems farmers don't even have, and how the "CBD effect" of claiming one product fixes everything erodes trust.  What challenges do crop input products need to overcome to survive? These: tighter environmental regulation, pressure on legacy chemistries, thinner government support, and a shakeout that could take out half of the mid-size input companies.
The Business of Agriculture with Damian Mason is brought to you by:
Heads Up Plant Protectants
Tidal Grow Agriscience
Nano-Yield 
Good Agriculture
Also, make sure to check out my new show Uprooted, DamianMason.com, XtremeAg's The Cutting The Curve Podcast and The Granary. 
 
 
This content is protected. ©Damian Mason, all rights reserved.