"Your greatest yield potential is when the seed is still in the bag. The first week of September before a game is played is like that for football fans," writes Successful Farming magazine Editor-in-Chief Loren Kruse. "We forget last year's team and try to believe that this will be the year we will get invited to a good bowl game. But believing isn't always easy, especially when our team has not performed well for multiple seasons."

"It's become increasingly difficult for farmers to find a reliable source of domestic labor to get chores done. So they've turned to foreign workers," writes Successful Farming magazine Deputy Machinery Editor Laurie Potter. "As the migrant worker pool shrinks, farmers are back to square one. Most row-crop farmers have been untouched by the lack of labor since they've been able to alleviate the problem by adding or sharing equipment and resources."

"I look at the farmers who were successful in selling their 2009 crop. They managed their marketing. They had a plan," writes market analyst Alan Kluis. "These successful farmers used a combination of risk-management tools. They used a combination of crop insurance, hedges, hedge to arrive, and put options. The farmers who did not have a plan and hoped for higher prices -- well, they are mostly still hoping."