Things moving along on the farm!!!

We have a good crop growing here. The cool weather has set it back some but it still looks like a good yielding corn crop. There just will be little harvested early this year. The Sept. dry corn shelling will be very few acres.

August is the bean month. If we have cool weather with moisture then we will have a good soybean crop here.

The hay looks great as the cooler weather has not put the regrowth of alfalfa under much stress. Should be a very good crop all in all.

The current cattle on feed are gaining very well without the usual heat stress that limits gains.

The brood cows/calves are moving right along too as the pastures look great for this time of year.

So the outlook is very positive on the production side of things. The price for cattle/calves is at record levels. That is tempered by grain prices being near/under the cost of production for many.

So it is really back to "normal" in farm country. The record high grain prices of the last few years made it look easy to make money farming. Now we will see who has what it takes to survive/prosper in the more traditional markets.

Buy a good supply of Anti acid tablets and paper/pencils as you will need plenty of both for the times ahead.

Best line I ever heard was "Farmers get in to trouble when they go from trying to make a living,to trying to make money". This'll separate the farmers from the college boys who thought there was money in it.

I always find it amusing at the guys who rush in when the price gets high on something like corn or cattle and get out when the price goes down. we have a large number of new grain and cattle "farmers" around here. We had one fellow in the community that made quite a bit of money in the green bean{snap bean} business. Every time cattle prices would go up he would buy a bunch of cattle and related equipment. When prices went down he would sell all the cows and equipment. I can fondly remember hearing him on more than one occasion complain because he could never make money in the cattle business.

Unfortunately to many get into the "Buy high/sell low" cycle. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that a lot of ag products are cyclical and to make money you get in and stay in and ride the cycles out, sometimes you make money, sometimes you loose but it will average out. If you want to jump in and out, jump in when it's LOW and sell out when it's HIGH that way you ride the cycle on the uptick. The kind of animal or crop you're raising will give you an idea of the cycle frequency. I think this was in High School Vo-Ag class.