MANAGEMENT

A fundamental goal to a successful harvest season is that “everyone goes home at the end of the day – whole, healthy and ideally in better shape and condition than at the start of their work day.” There is also a very real financial side to a successful and safe harvest. Prevention of accidents and their resultant injury and illness reduces your annual worker’s compensation bill.

Recordkeeping – the term conjures up hours of office work and data entry. It’s the nemesis of many a productive farmer, a nightmare of paperwork and frustrating computer programs.

Over the course of the last year, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee gradually raised the interest rate on overnight deposits (the discount rate) from 1 percent at the end of 2016 to 1.75 percent at the end of 2017.

As we enter the new year, many of you have set resolutions you hope to keep throughout the year – but may have broken them by the time you read this article.

Just like skipping to the last half of a book, using laboratory hay quality analysis to make purchasing decisions doesn’t give you the full story.

The last time you bought a bag of lawn seed, did you examine the small print that lists the forage species and cultivars? Or when you purchased perennial seed to renovate a pasture, did you carefully note the species listed for each commercial seed mix?