The library contains hundreds of documents that address the production, price, financial, legal, and human aspects of risk. Documents are organized by type of risk, commodity, geographic region, and type of material, including fact sheets, articles, bulletins, curriculum, presentations, and software programs. We hope you will find it a valuable resource. This year it was used to complete summaries including 3,920 farms in Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Michigan, and Utah. The average specialized Minnesota beef operator struggled to show a profit.
Size seems to have been a bigger factor than in previous years.
Of course, individual farms within all of these groups are all over the board. Some small farms were very profitable. But these benchmarks help us feel the pulse of the industry. We expect 1998 to be a very different year. Kent Olson, an agricultural economist from our Department of Applied Economics, applied expected 1998 yields and prices to our Southwest Minnesota Farm Business Management Association 1997 database.