Pivotal Issues Blog

By: Shawn Williamson Some farmers love what they do so much that they intend to do it until the end. Others would like to retire for health reasons or to have time for other interests. A portion of retired farmers will be able to live comfortably on the combination of farm rents and Social Security. […]

By: Bill Spiegel “This is a good old truck,” the retiring farmer told me, softly, when he opened the door to his machine shed. Inside was the purchase I’d driven 350 miles to obtain: a 1999 Chevrolet 1-ton pickup. I’d seen the truck on the Fanning Auction Service sale bill, and it struck me as […]

By: Jodi Henke We’ve been using the “acre” as a way of measuring land since the first plow dug into American soil. The area of an acre is a lot bigger than a few feet but much less than a square mile. So how did this moniker of measurement come to be? Michael Pugh is […]

By: Laurie Bedord With about 15 million bales produced in 2020, cotton is considered America’s No. 1 value-added crop. However, it requires access to natural resources such as water that are increasingly at risk. By sending 48 cotton seeds to the International Space Station, botanists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hope to generate ideas for […]

By: Jodi Henke Should you choose bias or radial tires for your farm machinery? Both types are round and hold air, but their construction is very different. Radials allow the sidewall and tread to function as two independent features of the tire. Bias tires have multiple rubber plies, or layers overlapping each other. Puncture resistance […]

By: Joseph White DETROIT, Jan 4 (Reuters) – John Deere & Co said on Tuesday it will start commercial delivery this year of technology that enables a tractor to till a field without an operator in the cab, a first for the top North American tractor manufacturer after years of effort to automate farm work. […]

By: Myron Friesen On several occasions, my wife and I have thought we kind of knew what we wanted for our plan, but land prices keep going up and it seems like the target keeps moving. We have three kids and 900 acres. One of our children is farming with us. We still want to […]

By: Lisa Foust Prater There was a time when the notion of getting married in a barn seemed like a crazy idea, but now barns and farms are the second-most popular wedding venue, according to a poll by wedding planning website The Knot. Farmers and other landowners have caught on to the trend, and barn […]

By: Mark McLaughlin Our advisers recommended that we gift 40% of our land to our kids to reduce potential estate losses upon death. One son farms, and the other three have off-farm jobs. We have appraisals and plan to use some of our lifetime credit through the Form 709 gift tax return. What else should […]

By: Laurie Bedord Over the years, a farmer’s reliance on herbicides to combat weeds has increased greatly. From 2012 to 2016, about 281 million pounds of glyphosate, an active ingredient in most herbicides, were applied to 298 million acres annually in the United States, according to the EPA. Issues such as potential bans on herbicides […]