Commodity Marketing
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Is This Farm Boom Different?!
The Kansas City Federal Reserve just released an issue of their Main Street Economist report that summarized their 2012 Agricultural Symposium held in July. We had previously done a quick post on this, but the latest issue does an extremely good job of summarizing the data presented at the Symposium. History does seem to repeat […]
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Where Will Harvest Price End Up For Crop Insurance?
The USDA report that came out this morning appeared to have a bullish bias to it. Corn and Beans were up at least 20 cents and wheat was not too far behind. As of today prices, it appears the average corn price for the month of October for the harvest crop pricing is about $7.50 […]
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Columbia Basin Region Second to California in Diversified Crop Production
One of our local newspapers – The Tri-Cities Herald – is running a 29 part series on the various types of crops that are grown in the Columbia Basin region of Washington and Oregon. So far, they have run about 10 parts, but it is an excellent review of the various crops grown in the part […]
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A Lot of Fighting Words Over “Sugar”
We ran across this article on the continued fight between the makers of “natural” sugar (i.e. from cane and beets) and “corn sugar”. The corn processing industry has tried to change the official name of their product from high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) to “corn sugar”. The perception is that the word sugar has a better […]
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What About Hay?
We seem to write mostly about the main three grain crops in the US (corn, beans and wheat) since they comprise a large portion of US Ag revenues. However, there are several other very important crops that are harvested every year. One of those crops is hay. I have reviewed the data from the USDA […]
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A Decelerating Trend in Farmland Prices
The Chicago Federal Reserve Bank issued their 2012 Second Quarter AgLetter last week and it indicated that the rapid acceleration in farmland prices over the last two years has moderated substantially. For the district, year-over-year prices had risen by 12% in Indiana to a high of 24% for Iowa. However, the increase in prices for the […]
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USDA Shows Large Livestock Losses
As we discussed the estimated 2012 net farm income from the USDA report yesterday, the grain farmers are looking at a very good year at the expense of the livestock operators. USDA is predicting that dairy revenues will fall from about $40 billion to $33 billion and in connection with much higher feed prices, this […]
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2012 US Net Farm Income At a New Record Even With The Drought!
In a report from the USDA issued today, they project that net cash income from farming will increase by 3.4 percent from 2011 to a new record of $122.2 billion. Net value added is expected to increase by $5.9 billion to $172.6 billion. Due to the market effects of the drought and the expected large […]
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Mid-West Crop Tour Recap
My part of the Midwest Crop Tour started in Columbus, Ohio early Monday morning and finished up at the Iowa/Minnesota far eastern border around noon on Thursday. We traveled through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and into Minnesota. The samples that our team took each day on route seemed to be a little bit better than […]
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The International Flavor of the Crop Tour
Today we left Bloomington, headed north 50 miles and then went due west to Iowa City, Iowa. Joining us was a group of 8 that included one from England, one from Germany two for from Brazil. This group followed us for the whole day and was here on the tour to determine how this crop […]