It always helps to have farmers on your side... Thanks Paul (he was responding recently on LinkedIn to this article: https://t.co/NBm213pCdp by @svnoles )
This is absolutely insane:
The SpaceX IPO has now drawn more than $70 BILLION worth of retail orders alone.
SpaceX is raising $75 billion, making retail interest ALONE enough to nearly fill the entire sale.
To put this in perspective, the previous record IPO was Saudi Aramco in 2020 at $29.4 billion.
This means that retail interest in SpaceX is now 2.4 TIMES larger than the total amount raised in the previous largest IPO in history.
As a result, SpaceX has announced that 20% of their IPO will be allocated to retail investors, following through on @elonmusk's vision to democratize the record IPO.
Nothing even remotely near what SpaceX is about to do has ever happened.
Friday will be a historic day.
Live training session on CRM at our conference: We'll cover fundamentals that keep work organized, including activity entry, best practices, and the latest updates to our notification tools.
Register to save your seat today! https://t.co/hTsaYHnrVf
There's a clay tablet with the founding charter of a 12-partner company on it. Twelve merchants pooled 33 pounds of gold to start the firm. The contract has the partner names, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for cashing out early.
The tablet is nearly 4,000 years old. It was found at a site called Kanesh, in central Turkey. Archaeologists have dug up 23,500 of these clay records there, most of them business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, lawsuits. The houses they were stored in eventually burned. The fire baked the clay solid and preserved every record.
The merchants came from Assur, in modern-day Iraq. They loaded donkeys with tin and cloth and walked them 1,000 kilometers across mountain passes to Kanesh, roughly the distance from New York to Atlanta. Each donkey carried about 180 pounds and the trip took two to three months. They came home with silver and gold.
The company ran for twelve years under a merchant named Amur Ishtar. A third of the profits went back to the investors. Pull your share out early and the firm gave you four kilos of silver per kilo of gold, half the normal rate. Locked-up money was meant to stay locked up.
That one company was just a tiny piece. The tablets show a complete economy with partners suing each other in commercial court, husbands writing home about prices, and wives writing back complaining the husband had been gone too long. A woman named Ahatum quietly lent silver to four different men over nine years. People bought up other people's loan documents and used them as collateral for new loans, the same thing Wall Street does today with mortgage-backed securities. One merchant got caught smuggling tin in his underwear to dodge a 10% import tax.
In 2019, four economists from Harvard, Sciences Po, Chicago, and Virginia ran the tablet numbers through a gravity model, the math economists use today to predict how much two countries will trade based on size and distance. The Bronze Age numbers matched modern trade numbers almost exactly. Trade fell off with distance at nearly the same rate it does between countries today. The paper ran in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
There was no economic theory yet. The idea didn't even have a name. The word "capitalism" wouldn't be coined for another 3,800 years, and Adam Smith was 3,700 years away from writing a sentence about markets. Just a guy named Pushu-ken writing a clay tablet to his business partner about a shipment of cloth, and a woman in Assur recording who owed her how much silver. Capitalism was already there, doing its full job, almost four thousand years before anyone wrote down a theory of how it worked.
Happy #SmallBusinessWeek 🎉
This week, we celebrate the more than 36 million small businesses across America that power the nation’s economy. Share to spread word!
Learn more: https://t.co/jVJqNTydJv
I'll assume the venn diagram of: "I have a very good understanding of my cost of production" and "estimate in my head" has more overlap then it should.
State of the Farm by Bushel is a very well done product. I still think the survey is too long/tideous though.
@jakefromfargo
@twostarfarmer Thanks Adam! It's a lot... but enough people get through it in detail it works. Think we truly need less/simpler questions or is it a streamline/workflow problem?
Dig into this - pretty interesting trends on things like a plummeting interest in sustainability programs and significantly more interest in crop marketing work.
🎉 The Bushel 2026 State of the Farm Report is here!
Download today to find out farmer preferences on technology, Artificial Intelligence, grain marketing, lending trends and more.
https://t.co/8nXdbI0EIk
Last week, we sat down to discuss how Bushel’s partnership with CFA helps ag retailers get paid faster and reduce the cost and risks associated with paper checks.
Watch the full replay here: https://t.co/qyavhIlN4i
We've made a ton of progress at Bushel over the last year - take a look at this! Let me know your feedback if you are a user of any of our tools.
Flow is our theme for 2026.
Bushel builds tools for farmers and agribusinesses that don’t just work, they work together. No more lost paperwork. No more waiting on something lost in the shuffle. Just easier decisions & less back-and-forth.
Learn more at https://t.co/ld2ns2b2F5.