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business planning

Beef Cow Rental Arrangements for Your Farm

Managing risk is required for many farm enterprises to be profitable and sustainable. Leasing assets, rather than purchasing them, is a form of risk management as it typically requires less capital. Leasing or sharing arrangements between farm operators and property owners have long been used to acquire control of land.

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Strategies for Success in Turbulent Times: Ten Strategic Initiatives

Farm businesses are facing increasing complexity and uncertainty in today’s turbulent business climate. Farms continue to be family based businesses and are modest size compared too much of the industrial sector, but an increasing number of farms are becoming multi-million dollar gross sales businesses with a sizeable work-force and rapidly increasing financial capital and land resources.

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Structural Change in Agriculture: Implications for the Farming Sector

The global food and agribusiness industry is in the midst of major changes – changes in product characteristics, in worldwide distribution and consumption, in technology, in size and structure of firms in the industry, and in geographic location of production and processing.

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Farm Growth: Venture Analysis and Business Models

Continued consolidation and concentration in the agricultural industries has stimulated numerous discussions and debates about the advantages and disadvantages of large vs. small firms and why the general trend/direction of most structural change in agriculture is to larger scale businesses.

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The Wealth Effect in U.S. Agriculture

Since 2009, wealth in the U.S. farm sector has surged along with booming farmland values. Similar to nonfarm households, farm enterprises historically have used wealth to support consumption and investments when income fades. During years of low income, farmers tap their existing wealth to finance spending on capital investments such as buildings, vehicles, machinery and other equipment.

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Pasture Rental Arrangements

The purpose of this publication is to help tenants and landlords make sound decisions and develop workable pasture rental arrangements. The publication demonstrates how to determine the landowner and livestock owner contributions to livestock production and how to use that to arrive at agreeable leasing arrangements.

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Managing in Times of Financial Stress

The best strategy is to resolve financial stress problems before they become severe. One of the most important rules of managing in times of financial stress is summed up in the simple but powerful phrase-early recognition, early resolution.

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Income Enhancement Strategies for Farmers

As farmers, you know that cost reduction is clearly the place to begin when developing survival strategies if you are facing serious financial difficulties. But many of you have adopted intensive production systems and have already reduced costs to the bare minimum over the last several years while prices of inputs continue to rise rapidly. This leaves little room for advice on how to weather financial stress through cost reduction.

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Strategic Planning: Scanning the Horizon

Any planning activity involves thinking about the future. However, the focus of strategic planning is not on predicting the future, but instead on making better decisions here and now in order to reach a desired future. Because the future cannot be known with certainty, farm business managers must make certain assumptions about what the future will hold.

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The Internal Analysis of Your Farm Business: What is Your Farm’s Competitive Advantage?

Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your farm business will help you identify those activities conducted on the farm that can create a sustainable competitive advantage for the business. To accomplish this goal, it is necessary to identify those activities at which your farm business excels, not just activities that it does equally as well as its competitors.

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