News

The executive director of the Kansas Farm Management Association at K-State, Kevin Herbel, breaks down the crop and livestock enterprise numbers from the recently-released Kansas net farm income report for 2016. He talks about the profitability of each of the major crops last year, as well as the returns to cow-calf and backgrounder cattle production, and things that made the difference between high-profit and low-profit operations within a given enterprise.

Brian Briggeman and Kansas Cooperative Council president Leslie Kaufman preview the 2017 K-State Symposium on Cooperative Issues and the KCC Leadership Roundtable, which will take place concurrently at K-State in August to address current financial challenges facing local agricultural cooperatives and their members.

Art Barnaby discusses recent changes in the hard winter wheat futures contract made by the CME intended to bring back convergence in cash and futures wheat prices. He focuses on the variable storage rate which has been adopted with the intent of prompting that price convergence.

K-State agricultural economist Ted Schroeder discusses the findings of a brand-new survey he's been involved with, which polled farmers in Kansas and eight other states about their grain marketing practices. The results shed light on how producers use the wide variety of marketing tools to generate maximum income and manage market risk.

A discussion by KFMA executive director Kevin Herbel and economists Craig Althauser, Sandy Myers, Mark Wood, Bryan Manny, Will Feldkamp and Jim Huschka, of 2016 Kansas net farm income, from the Kansas Farm Management Association showing improvement in overall farm income from the previous year, but with some notable exceptions. 

Monte Vandeveer discusses crop insurance options for wheat growers in western Kansas whose stands were adversely affected by the freezing temperatures and/or snowstorm that struck the High Plains in late April. He says that producers who incurred crop losses have some flexibility in how they claim the indemnity on that wheat, as well as how they insure any second crop they would plant on that acreage.

K-State agricultural economists Beth Yeager, Art Barnaby and Dan O'Brien discuss what they've discovered about the ongoing issue of wide basis in the wheat market: the lack of convergence of cash and futures wheat prices, which has complicated producers' ability to advance-price their wheat...they recently met with futures market officials to talk about remedies for the problem, and are about to release a K-State report covering the issue. 

K-State livestock economist Glynn Tonsor talks about consumer perceptions of meat animal health management, which was the theme of a webinar he presented earlier this week...he references a new study of the livestock production practices and product traits that consumers prioritize when they make meat purchase decisions, saying that the production sector must be willing to adjust to the signals consumers are sending.