Jim Campion

#AgPhDUpdate | Lime and Incorporation Does ag lime need to be incorporated in order to raise your soil pH and be as effective as possible?  On our farm, we try crazy stuff sometimes, but that has helped give us a good education.  For example, many years ago we started applying 6 tons of lime each fall to part of a field that had ridiculously high magnesium.  Over a 6-year period we applied 30 tons of lime.  30 tons!!  Even if we did incorporate, we never went deep, yet our deep soil tests all the way down to 24 inches showed a dramatic change in calcium after a few years.  That proved to us what we had heard for years, that lime would move down in the soil profile.  If you are trying to change the soil pH in your top 6 inches immediately, incorporation is the best way to do that.  However, if you’re in no rush, you certainly do not have to till in your lime.  Either way, soil pH will eventually change.

I opened my first bank account at 14 at Farmers & Merchants State Bank. $41 in quarters from mowing lawns, carried in a Folgers can. The teller, Linda, counted every one by hand and gave me a sucker and a passbook. Nobody asked for two forms of ID. She knew my mom. When I was 19 and broke, a loan officer named Gary in a short-sleeve dress shirt and a tie from 1987 gave me $3,200 for a truck. No credit score worth mentioning. He just asked who my grandpa was, nodded, and said "he paid his feed bill on time for forty years." That was the underwriting. There were over 14,000 banks in America in 1984. Today there are fewer than 4,500. Every year a few hundred more get swallowed. The acquirer flies in a guy with a lanyard who says nothing will change. Then the passbooks go. Then Linda goes. Then the lobby cookies. Then the drive-thru tube. Then the branch closes, the vault gets sold for scrap, and the building becomes a Dollar General or a vape shop with a Wi-Fi password taped to the register. And one day, not that far off, the last one will close. Somewhere in Kansas a man will try to borrow money against a combine and get routed to a chatbot in Charlotte. Here's the part Wall Street hasn't figured out. Some of these little banks still trade below book value. Clean loan books. Sleepy boards. Deposits that haven't moved since the Carter administration because Doris doesn't trust apps. They're the last real cigar butts left. Ugly, boring, forgotten, and full of value nobody's looking at. So I buy them. Not because they'll make me rich overnight. Because every share is a vote for a version of capitalism that once knew my name, my mom's name, and my grandpa's feed bill. The big banks want you to believe this is progress. Go tell that to Gary.

Warren Buffett paid $44 billion for BNSF Railroad. Today it mails Berkshire roughly $5 billion a year in profit. Not stock. The actual earnings of a 32,000-mile iron road. He closed the deal in 2010 after chasing it for years. He called it an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States. He bought out the remaining 77 percent of a company Berkshire already owned, and has not touched the ownership since. In 2024, that same railroad shipped grain, oil, cars and container boxes across the continent and sent Berkshire roughly $5 billion in profit. $13.7 million every day. $570,000 every hour. $158 every second. For doing nothing. That is an 11 percent annual return on what he paid. Not on what the railroad is worth today. On the check he wrote in 2010. He held through the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. Through the oil collapse of 2015. Through the trade war of 2018. Through the pandemic shock of 2020. Through the supply chain mess of 2022. The trains kept rolling and the earnings kept arriving. BNSF traces its first track back to 1849. One hundred and seventy-six years of hauling coal, grain and freight through every war and every panic the United States has ever had. People watch stock tickers because they move every second. The thing that actually compounded for Buffett was a business with 32,000 miles of iron that nobody is ever going to lay again. He paid $44 billion for BNSF Railroad. The earnings alone are now $5 billion a year. He has never written another check and he has never sold a single mile.

Hot take: the NFL season should start with 12 games kicking off on Sunday at 1PM, two games at 4PM, then Sunday Night Football and the grand finale on Monday Night. This Wednesday-Thursday-Friday charade is horrendous.

Nebraska 2 Minute Warning once again T R U M P pretends to be helping and in reality steak by steak he is destroying the US Cattlemen. The wolf in Cow Camouflage has surfaced.

Kanye West, the controversial South Side rapper that some have called Chicago’s biggest cultural export, returns for two hometown shows at Soldier Field. chicagotribune.com/2026/08/2…

Chicago sports radio used to be comedy. Two unhinged hosts with crazy opinions taking calls from bobs 12 cocktails deep at the horseshoe saying all the things out loud that I don’t want to say because I don’t want to sound crazy. It was less about the sports opinions being grounded in stats and more about funny bits and being a crazy meatball fan. I used to love listening to the score after bears losses because I’d hear fans call in who were way crazier than I am and the hosts knew how to play into it. Chicago sports isn’t meant to be high brow. It’s gotta be raw, funny and mimic the 40+ yrs of fan crash outs because our teams haven’t been great.

Time flies, @BretBielema 😊

i did one too

A Dollar General employee putting out their cigarette to come in and ring you up is a great sign of respect in their culture.

Na Tailândia existe uma cultura inteira de pessoas que montam motores diesel modificados em suportes no meio da rua apenas para competir quem tem o som mais alto e a maior pressão de turbo, sem sequer ter um carro em volta.