BIG GREEN PEN, LLC
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA

You don’t have to get a job with a famous company or hot-shot industry in order to have a spectacular career. You just have to do what you do with reverence. The peanut marketing loan program has worked effectively since its inception in 2002. Growers have a marketing window of 9 months to sell their crop after receiving a marketing loan. The loan rate of $355 does not encourage over-production but it does provide enough liquidity to allow producers to wait for the best marketing opportunity. The marketing loan also allows for shellers to purchase the crop as they have sales for the shelled peanuts. The marketing loan is repaid with interest thus minimizing costs to the treasury. Peanuts are a unique crop requiring specialized equipment. To harvest the 1.6 million acres of peanuts grown annually in the U.S., farmers must have diggers and pickers that are very crop specific, thus making equipment investment cost very expensive. Peanuts have only a small fraction of the acres planted to all crops. Without separate payment limits, many peanut farmers would not benefit from the safety net established by the Price Loss Coverage (PLC). Peanut storage is another unique feature of this industry. Large barns utilizing belt conveyors store the crop while awaiting sale and delivery to the sheller. Peanut storage is too expensive for most farmers to build on their individual farms, so usually storage is provided by the buying point and charges accrue to the grower. When the grower sells his crop, the buyer pays those accrued storage costs. If the peanuts are forfeited, storage and handling charges are then paid by the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). If these costs were not covered, the grower would face economic pressure to sell his crop as his loan neared maturity. The small number of forfeitures throughout the fourteen years of this program has resulted in very low costs to the CCC for storage and handling, yet the backstop support for storage and handling costs has resulted in millions of dollars to the growers as a result of their ability to negotiate price without duress. To maintain stability in the marketplace, FPF supports a peanut program with a support payment (PLC or ARC) when the market price falls below the cost of production. FPF supports, for all active producers, a reference price of $535/ton with a base update using crop years 2009-2012. that contains research-based information on topics as varied as food, nutrition and health, youth development, agriculture, horticulture, crop production, animal husbandry, science and technology, small business and personal finance. Federal law provides that programs and facilities must be accessible (Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act). The federal regulations state: “shall provide auxiliary aids to persons with impaired sensory, manual, or speaking skills, where necessary to afford such persons an equal opportunity to benefit from the services.” This is interpreted to include educational services and programs, and applies to clientele, participants, students, and staff who may be impaired. keep documentation of personal visits by recording and filing details of the visits including the name of the contact person, date and location of the visit, the person making the visit, and any summary responses and other related information about the visit. , who had picked up on the Quora thread, said something like “coming up soon, Paula’s blog post about golf.” I am not sure how that ended up merging with my desire to blog about #APStyle, but I rarely shy away from a blogging challenge, so here we are. . Consistency hopefully helps reinforce the habit. are helpful; they are quick to complete and help you become aware of your deficits (and strengths!).