Farmers and ranchers with ties to the American Farm Bureau Federation may want to call the nonprofit and see if it happens to be doing anything special.  Farm Bureau should have more than a few dollars to spare, since it turns out the sale of FB.com to Facebook probably netted it around $8.5 million.

As you might remember, the transaction was announced in November, and Mark Zuckerberg made it sound rather insignificant (and funny) by stating, "The Farm Bureau has agreed to give us FB.com and we in return have agreed to not sell farm subsidies."

This afternoon, though, a Reuters article reported, "At their annual meeting in Atlanta, Farm Bureau officials on Tuesday said the organization earned $8.5 million by selling a couple of domain names but is barred from identifying the buyer."

It’s a good bet that the Facebook/FB.com arrangement was responsible for the bulk of that sum.  No other deals made headlines in the same way.

So again, although Facebook can’t be hurting (remember that it’s supposed to be worth $50 billion), Farm Bureau now has quite a bit more money than it did before, and lost nothing irreplaceable in the process.

Some farmers and ranchers may benefit as a result.