Month: January 2022

While organic soybeans are a hot commodity, our friends from Mercaris reported that the domestic organic corn market finished the year strong with prices recovering from last year’s dips. Production reached a +9% year-over-year increase with harvests estimated to reach 49.5 million bushels. Mercaris noted that US organic corn producers are expecting to expand their …

What a Year it Was for Organic Grains… Organic Soybean Prices Doubled Read More »

Humans have been manipulating the genetic code of plants for thousands of years. Early farmers adopted cross-breeding methods to modify various plants to produce more desirable traits. Traditional breeding techniques can take many years to develop the sought after changes, however, and often with mixed results. In the 1970s, agriculture was changed forever when scientists …

The Interesting History of Genetically Modified Crops Read More »

Shifts and changes in climate can prove to be catastrophic for crop production. In an effort to combat the potential complications, a team of researchers is trying to optimize photosynthesis, the natural process all plants use to convert sunlight into energy and yields. The ultimate goal of the project, dubbed “Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency,” or …

“RIPE”… Engineering Crops to Produce More with Less Read More »

Researchers for the first time have made grafting work in “monocotyledons”, a type of plant that includes are some of the world’s most important plants economically and culturally, and account for most of our staple foods. The “near-impossible” technique could increase production and eliminate diseases for some of agriculture’s most imperiled crops. An estimated 60,000 …

New Grafting Technique Could Help Combat Pathogens in the World’s Most Imperiled Crops Read More »

Following the recent termination of the proposed SPAC for AeroFarms, the sustainable indoor agriculture company based in Newark, New Jersey, along with the poor Q1 results from AppHarvest, the applied technology company building some of the world’s largest indoor farms, many VC investors might be having second thoughts about the “Controlled Environment Agriculture” space, or …

Indoor Ag Facing Crossroads of Hype and Reality Read More »

When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, it quickly transformed the transportation of grain and other staple goods between the country’s coastal ports and interior regions to the west. The canal system greatly lowered the cost of shipping between the Midwest and the Northeast and almost immediately increased trade throughout the nation by opening eastern …

A Brief History of America’s “Prairie Skyscrapers” Read More »

Higher input costs for animal protein supply chains, including animal feed, labor, energy and freight, will be top-of-mind change drivers for the animal protein industry in 2022 according to RaboBank’s Global Animal Protein Outlook 2022. Although markets are expected to settle somewhat in 2022, many drivers of recent change will remain. Higher input costs for …

Rabobank Forecasts Another Tumultuous Year for the Animal Protein Industry Read More »

We’re all intimately familiar with the effects of heatwaves and droughts on crops, but plant researchers are taking a deeper dive at exploring how warmer nighttime temperatures are impacting crops around the world like corn, wheat, barley, and rice. From data that is circulating, the night minimum temperature of the contiguous U.S. has increased by …

Higher Nightime Temps Might Be More Worriesome Than We Thought Read More »