Whether you’re running a lemonade stand or a 100,000-acre farm, "cash is king". That was, is, and always will be true.

As I’m writing this, the financial markets have just gone through a crazy week. The DOW has turned a loss for the year; the last 5-7 trading days have been losses. With the stock market and commodities down, everyone with money in publicly traded investments seems to be running for the door, converting everything to cash.

There’s really only one way to stand secure while everyone else panics about finance, and that’s having enough cash. In particular, there are five reasons cash will always have its place on a financial throne.

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Farmers are always interested in what’s going on in farmland sales, for good reason. It’s a competitive realm: you’re not only competing with the people who farm around you, you’re competing with investors. There are doctors in my area who don’t farm, but they sure are interested in renting it out.

Since it’s an eternally hot topic, I wanted to go over a three-part strategy to buying farmland that I believe can be very useful for anyone looking to make the best land purchase possible.

It took me a really long time to figure out how to streamline the financial efficiencies on our farming operation.

But here’s the amazing thing about the world today: I can take lessons I’ve learned over most of my life, package them into a blog post or a podcast episode, and deliver them to you free of charge.

The lesson in this case is how to save a lot of money in annual farming expenses. To help you trust that I’m qualified to teach the lesson, you need to know how I came to learn it.

Whether you’re a farmer, a banker, or a hot dog salesman, cash is always king.

So how do you make the decision between using cash and financing to buy an item?

Planting is the most important part of the farming process.

And with the passing of June 10, planting season is now over for much of the Corn Belt. It was a brutal time, battling Mother Nature. In my area, we even went from drought warnings to flood warnings in a week’s time.

All that pushing---it’s temporarily over. But now you’re looking back to figure out what just happened. Which seeds did you plant where? How do you make sense of it all?

You have a heap of data from planting season: from your tractor, field notes, and so on.

But most farmers only use that data to track the plant date and planted acres of each field. You might not know that what you do with your data makes a tremendous impact on your entire operation.

Follow the three steps below and turn your planting data into valuable insights that will make you more efficient (and profitable) during your next planting season.

"Not all dirt is created equal." (Click to Tweet)

Fields even a few miles apart will produce different amounts of rain; soil can change dramatically 100 feet away.

Yes, some fields are sagging your profits. But don’t worry: you can make any field profitable if you handle it right.

Here are six farm finance tips to maximize your profits and ensure that every field is profitable:

How low can you go?

Knowing whether or not the present commodity prices are too low for your farming operation is key to avoiding grain marketing mistakes.

The first question you need to answer is: What Are My Production Costs?