Author: Scott Anderson

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Whether you’re running a lemonade stand or a 100,000-acre farm, “cash is king $$$”. That was, is, and always will be true.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

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Whether you’re running a lemonade stand or a 100,000-acre farm, “cash is king $$$”. That was, is, and always will be true.
As I’m writing this, the financial markets have just gone through a crazy week. The DOW has turned a loss for the year; the last 5-7 trading days have been losses. With the stock market and commodities down, everyone with money in publicly traded investments seems to be running for the door, converting everything to cash.
There’s really only one way to stand secure while everyone else panics about finance, and that’s having enough cash. In particular, there are five reasons cash will always have its place on a financial throne.
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1) Liquidity
In your mind, who’s the greatest money manager of our generation?
You don’t even have to think about it: it’s  $ Warren Buffett $. If you google his name along with “cash is king,” or simply “Warren Buffett loves cash,” you’ll find tons of articles about how he keeps as much cash as he can. He says a “pile of cash” is something everyone should have as a savior in a tight spot.
If a farmer buys really high-priced land and the land values plummet, the bank might be calling in some loans. They’re going to tell the farmer he’s under water on his notes, and he’ll need to use some cash to catch up. At that point, he’d better have cash on hand.

Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway is worth a little over $300 billion, and his cash position is over $60 billion, which is a whopping 20%. You’re definitely a money master if 20% of your market value is in cash.
Farmers can find this percentage for their own operations. If a given farmer were to sell everything in his farming operation right now, the resulting cash total would be his current market value.
Let’s assume total market value is $10 million. 20% is $2 million, which would become the farmer’s ample safety net if aspired to match Warren Buffett’s sizeable percentage. But remember, that’s on the high end.
I would encourage farmers not to let their cash position fall below 5% of their farm’s net worth. That’s a good and attainable target. Even at 5%, they don’t have to worry about financial strain. 5% of that same $10 million operation is $500,000, a good amount of cash. If they don’t do a good job marketing commodities, or some other strain occurs and they lose money, they can still sustain their business.
There are times to aggressively grow and times to simply maintain. In a recession, which I consider us to be in, John Deere just reported a 40% drop in sales. If John Deere doesn’t have a good cash position, they could be in a bankruptcy position. They are in a maintenance phase.

A final note about liquidity: Buffett says cash is dry powder that you can quickly fire. If you go to a land auction and see that a piece of land is selling for a great discount, you can buy it now and finance it later. (And yes, you should always finance purchases you can’t deduct.)

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2) Financing Power
When farmers go to buy anything of high value, they have to present a balance sheet. Each one of those assets on the balance sheet has financing power.
If a farmer goes to the bank with $1 million in cash and wants to borrow another million to buy land, the banker will have no reservations. Cash has at least a “one to one” power. Realistically, he could probably go to the bank with $1 million and be approved to borrow twice as much.
Land is seen by banks at about 70% of its market value. So if a farmer has a $5,000/acre piece of land, his borrowing power against that land is about $3,500 dollars.
Machinery is worse. If the farmer bought a combine two years ago at $200,000 dollars, it might be worth $100,000 today. The bank will value that asset even lower: somewhere between 40-50% of its market value, which means it’s worth about $50,000 to him.

This is another reason why cash is king. The financing power it holds is astronomical compared to the power of other assets.

3) Preservation of Net Worth
Farmers must fall back on the #1 rule of investing: Preservation Of Capital.
Cash positions don’t fluctuate much. If you have $100,000 in cash, it’s worth $100,000 in cash. On the other hand, if you had $100,000 in stocks during the week prior to this writing, it’s probably about $80,000 now. The same goes for other assets; machinery and land can lose their value—fast.

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4) Psychological Comfort
If you ever watch Warren Buffett on TV, you’ve never seen a more relaxed guy when it comes to financial markets.
It makes sense. When 20% of your company’s market value is in cash, you’re cool as a cucumber all day because you’re never going to go out of business. You have the best financial cushion possible.
When farmers have a huge cash position, they’re relaxed to make better decisions. Many, however, are nervous now. Some spent a lot of cash on machinery in the last few years, their cash position is low, and they worry about whether they’re producing corn for more than they can sell it for.
But the farmer in a good cash position isn’t even nicked by nervousness.

5) Opportunities

When everybody’s on one side of the boat, you have to be on the other side. As Buffet says, when everyone’s fearful, you need to be greedy, and when everyone’s greedy, you need to be fearful.
Right now, the general financial landscape is full of fearfulness. If land is for sale, there won’t be a lot of buyers, which means that land prices will be better than they were last year.
If you have a strong cash position, you can pick up land and machinery that will add value to your operation at good prices.
They say “luck favors the prepared.” I’ve always believed that. If you’re prepared, you’re ready to execute on opportunities. You can buy publicly traded companies and buy land when everyone else is running away.
That is, if you have a strong cash position.

Conclusion
If you need a little more convincing of the kingship of cash, google Warren Buffett and just listen to him talk. He maintains great return on investment without using 100% of his cash. He always has his “dry powder.”
If your cash position is lower than 5%, convert to cash those assets that aren’t providing you lots of value. Sell off old machinery and scrap piles sitting around. Don’t spend lavishly.
Once you have 5%, shoot for 10%. Try to get up to that Buffett level of 20%. You’ll never have an issue with financing, you’ll always be ready for time-sensitive opportunities, and you’ll never lose sleep at night worrying about paying your bills.
For more specific instruction on when farmers should or shouldn’t use cash, check out this article on farm finance.

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]It took me a really long time to figure out how to streamline the financial efficiencies on our farming operation.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

It took me a really long time to figure out how to streamline the financial efficiencies on our farming operation.
But here’s the amazing thing about the world today: I can take lessons I’ve learned over most of my life, package them into a blog post or a podcast episode, and deliver them to you free of charge.
The lesson in this case is how to save a lot of money in annual farming expenses. To help you trust that I’m qualified to teach the lesson, you need to know how I came to learn it.

My Story…
I was born and raised in South Dakota, in a small farm town of 99 people. My father was a farmer, as was my grandfather before him; so I’ve been riding in tractors and inhaling the sweet, yeasty smell of corn since I was a kid.
About 30 years ago, my dad invented some farm equipment; he called it the Anderson Opener. It allowed farmers to put their small grains and fertilizer down in one pass. It was technology that really helped farmers, and it inspired me early on to develop something equally helpful some day.
I went to college at the University of Nebraska, where I became interested in finance. I had stars in my eyes over the stock market, publicly traded investments, and the way the captains of industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s made fortunes investing in stocks and speculating in futures and exchanges.

When Warren Buffett and Bill Gates came to my university for a Q&A, it was a tipping point for me. If a guy like Warren Buffet from Omaha could make it on Wall Street, so could Scott Anderson from Andover, South Dakota.
After college, I was fortunate enough to have contacts who connected me to a job in New York—on Wall Street no less, working in investment banking. During that time, I continued to expand my finance education. I took a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) level one exam and went to Switzerland for a month to study finance at the Swiss Finance Academy.
I learned enough to totally change the lens through which I saw farming when I returned to South Dakota a few years later. Farming, and really all commodities at that time, were on their way to record highs.  Anyone could make money farming. Unfortunately the music had to stop and the tide went out revealing those who were swimming without bathing suits. But my fortunate string of financial education had prepared me to weather the new challenge.[/vc_column_text][ult_buttons btn_title=”TRY CASHCOW FARMER FREE FOR 30 DAYS” btn_link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fcashcowfarmer.clickfunnels.com%2F30daytrial||target:%20_blank” btn_align=”ubtn-center” btn_size=”ubtn-small” btn_title_color=”#ffffff” btn_bg_color=”#00ab61″ btn_hover=”ubtn-fade-bg” btn_bg_color_hover=”#ffffff” btn_title_color_hover=”#00ab61″ btn_icon_pos=”ubtn-sep-icon-at-left” btn_border_style=”solid” btn_color_border=”#ffffff” btn_color_border_hover=”#00ab61″ btn_border_size=”2″ btn_font_size=”18″][vc_column_text]

The Creation of Cash Cow Farmer
Back in South Dakota, I took over the farm operation and started to figure out the most efficient way to grow crops in our area. Most importantly, I wanted to determine precise production costs. Each field has a different productive capacity, and I wanted to know the cost of every bushel of corn and every soybean in our farm’s inventory.
On Wall Street, I had used spreadsheets to model out corporate finance such as mergers and acquisitions; I could analyze what a company looked like at the time and how their efficiencies would change if they merged with a given company.
So I used that experience to build spreadsheets for the farm. I would first build a budget and then record our actual production costs, and I discovered some very valuable information.
We’d been renting 600 acres for 25 years from a certain woman. She had just increased our rent, and I realized that the fields were not in ideal locations and didn’t fit our operation well. My spreadsheet told me we were paying $150 an acre in rent, but only making $10-20 an acre.

We cut those 600 acres, which is unthinkable for many farmers. But for me it was economical. Yes, our operation will be 600 acres smaller, but we were losing money in those fields, so retaining them wasn’t worth it.
By the fall of 2014, the value of corn and soybeans had dropped by 30%. Everybody was losing money on their books. People were nervous, locally and around the world. So I thought I should share my spreadsheet, because one of the most comforting things for a farmer (or any business owner) is knowing exactly where you are financially.
But for many people, the spreadsheet was too complex to be practical. It was 27 pages long and had to account foreverything. It was intimidating. I wished I could hide all the calculations so that a farmer could simply input what they paid (from their receipts) and applied (from their maps and controllers.)
It was time to upgrade the spreadsheets.
Around this time I went to Startup Weekend, a startup entrepreneurial event. The concept is that you pitch an idea for a business. If it’s selected by the audience, you can build a team, build your minimum product by Sunday, and present it in front of a panel of judges who are successful entrepreneurs.
I pitched Cash Cow Farmer on Friday night. Out of 30-40 ideas, twelve were picked, including Cash Cow.
I picked my team of 6 people, and we built a prototype and presented it. It was a hit, and we launched in December of 2014. The software is based in the cloud, accessed from a phone, tablet, or computer. We’ve found that when we present the idea to farmers, they realize it’s exactly what they need.

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My own farming has benefited tremendously from Cash Cow, especially as I prepared for 2015. I knew how much my operation had spent in 2014, and I used that data in Cash Cow to determine what I could afford to pay in 2015. I could present that information to the people I wanted to buy from and work out the best deals for our farm.
Our billing procedures were also transformed by Cash Cow. In day-to-day billing, so much activity gets written down, shuffled around, and misbilled all the time.
If, say, I get billed for $22 for Roundup when I’ve pre-payed $19, I can pull up my price sheet on Cash Cow and locate exactly what I negotiated for the product. So much money would slip through the cracks without the Cash Cow software to reference.
It helped me again when we had a recent spike in commodity prices for corn and soybeans. I knew it would cost me $2.95 cents to grow a bushel of corn, and the cash price to sell it came out to about $3.60. I determined that I might as well sell; the profit margin took all the emotion out of the decision.
Farmers try to call the top of the market, but that’s a dangerous game to play. Not many people can call the top, but you never go out of business selling at a profit.

How to save $50,000+
Now to deliver on the promise of the title: how can you save $50,000+ in annual farming expenses?
The answer is simple and probably obvious by now: By using Cash Cow Farmer!
And the sweetest part of the deal is that little plus you see after the number. Our farm saved at least $50,000 just by calling out billing mistakes. Since that’s only one small part of what Cash Cow does, you could potentially save hundreds of thousands of dollars or more after applying it across your operation.

Conclusion
Farming is the toughest job in the world, in my opinion. During the majority of the year, it’s the riskiest and one of the most labor intensive jobs in existence.
Last weekend, we had a hail storm that wiped out several crops. Another time, we had both a drought warning and a flood warning in the span of a single week.
Farming is really hard, but Cash Cow makes it easier. Most farmers aren’t fortunate enough to have the financial training that I have, which is why I’ve taken that training and created a tool for the everyday farmer.
You can try a free trial of Cash Cow Farmer for 30 days. I guarantee that if you do, you’ll be able to see how the software can save you piles of cash and utterly transform the efficiency of your farming operation.

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Whether you’re a farmer, a banker, or a hot dog salesman, cash is always king.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Whether you’re a farmer, a banker, or a hot dog salesman, cash is always king.
But farmers have their own unique challenges when it comes to maintaining the best cash position. When farmers purchase or improve assets, it’s not always apparent whether they should buy with cash or finance those items.
So how do you make the decision between using cash and financing to buy an item?
It depends on what the expense does to the asset. Let me explain: 

Expenses vs. Capitalization
The main factor in the decision between paying cash and financing is how it’s deducted from your income.
Past tax laws were kind to farmers. Under Section 179 accelerated depreciation allowance, farmers could deduct up to $500,000 of expenses per year.
These terms expired last year, and under the 2015 version of Section 179, farmers can only deduct $25,000 per year at an accelerated pace. While this is certainly a game changer, and limits what farmers can buy and deduct, the principle for how to buy items remains:

If you have to capitalize the expense, you’re better off financing it.
Let’s say you spend $50,000 on precision planting machinery for your planter. The planter worked all right before, but this new technology will make your planting more precise and improve your yield.
This expense can’t be deducted, since it’s an asset improvement. If you get audited, the IRS will say it needs to be capitalized.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]This is another text box. Paste your written content here or delete this section by hovering over it and clicking the trashcan icon. No formatting necessary.[/vc_column_text][ult_buttons btn_title=”SCHEDULE A FREE GRAIN MARKETING STRATEGY SESSION” btn_link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fcashcowfarmer.clickfunnels.com%2Fmarketing-strategy||target:%20_blank” btn_align=”ubtn-center” btn_size=”ubtn-small” btn_title_color=”#ffffff” btn_bg_color=”#00ab61″ btn_hover=”ubtn-fade-bg” btn_bg_color_hover=”#ffffff” btn_title_color_hover=”#00ab61″ btn_icon_pos=”ubtn-sep-icon-at-left” btn_border_style=”solid” btn_color_border=”#ffffff” btn_color_border_hover=”#00ab61″ btn_border_size=”2″ btn_font_size=”18″][vc_column_text]

In this case, it’s better to finance the technology, especially with current interest rates where they are. You’ll have a liability on your balance sheet, but your cash position will remain strong. And remember, interest is 100% deductible.
If you spend $50,000 in cash, your balance sheet will reflect improved assets of $50,000, but the bank might calculate that value at $25,000 because of mark-to-market accounting laws. As with driving a new car off the lot, your technology immediately depreciates. So in this case your net worth would be lowered by paying cash instead of financing.
Your cash is worth more than that asset. Cash is more liquid. Cash has the highest value on your balance sheet, so you want to keep your cash position strong by financing the item that can’t be entirely depreciated or expensed.
But in another scenario, let’s say your combine breaks down and won’t run, and $10,000 later it’s fixed. That’s a repair expense. Not all repair expenses can be deducted in the same year as the repair, but a repair that brings your machinery from a non-working to a working condition—as in this case—can be deducted 100%.
That’s exactly the type of purchase for which it’s better to use cash, or an operating line of credit. This expense will decrease your income tax liability.

To be sure, this stuff is tricky because it doesn’t always make sense. Taxes are a big expense, but If you’re paying a lot of taxes, find out why. If you had a profitable year, you’re going to pay taxes—so be it.
But don’t buy $500,000 worth of machinery to save yourself $100,000 in tax liability. That’s not good for your net worth: it decreases it.
Another thing to take into account as you acquire an asset is the item’s depreciation schedule.

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Depreciation Schedules
There are many lengths of depreciation schedules, depending on what the purchased item is.
A land improvement, for example, has to be depreciated over 15-20 years. Let’s say you put drain tile on your farms. That expense can’t be deducted that year; it has to be depreciated over 15-20 years, legally.
You can try to depreciate it, but if you get audited, the IRS will charge you taxes, fees, and interest. And because of high interest rates, you can expect to pay 2-3 times what you would have originally paid if you’d done everything properly.
If you want to know more about the depreciation schedules, google the Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System. MACRS is the current tax reference used in the U.S. to depreciate capitalized costs of tangible property.
But the #1 rule for farmers is to get a good accountant who can reference the system for you.

Take a look at the chart for a 7-year MACRS. It’s complicated, down to the hundredth decimal percentage place, which is why the accountant is so important. That savings you think you got can come back and cost you a lot of money.
There are a lot of farmers who go to a land auction and buy land from a farmer who’s retiring or has financial problems, only to realize the IRS has a lien against the land because that farmer owes so much in back taxes.
When farmers get caught up trying to minimize income tax, they run the risk of using up their cash position. And, if they don’t do their taxes correctly, it can cost them huge fees from the IRS later.
The moral of the story? A good accountant is absolutely worth it. 

Two Extra Tips
1) Pay your taxes– You’re better off paying your taxes and hoarding your cash. You don’t want to burn cash to pay down debt. Debt is actually a pretty useful tool for offsetting income down the road.
2) Talk to your banker– Bankers know what you can get for credit; lean on them for information as you purchase items.

Conclusion
Established farmers may already have land and machines paid off. But young farmers—ones who have farmed 15 years or less—will really need to focus on making good decisions about financing vs. cash, and being aware of depreciation schedules.
Whatever your age or experience, you have to understand your cash position. And you shouldn’t just have cash sitting in the bank either. You want your cash working for you, whether through stocks or some other investment suggested by a money manager.
For further help: EideBailley has developed a useful flowchart on how to treat expenditures related to tangible property. Follow it step-by-step to learn whether expensing or capitalizing an item will give you the best cash position.

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