A Roadmap to Better Decision Making

Australia is on track to produce its second-largest wheat crop in history with exports that are expected to match. USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service's post in Canberra recently forecast Australia's wheat production at 31 million metric tons (MMT) for the 2020/21 marketing year, more than double last year's drought-afflicted output of just over 15 MMT and 1 million higher than the ...

One of the key challenges in soil carbon management is finding ways to sequester carbon -- that is, capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide -- in soil so that it can be used by plants and other organisms. The primary way that carbon is stored in the ground is as soil organic matter, effectively limiting the amount of carbon that ...

USDA's latest outlook for the farm economy in 2021 forecasts higher receipts for crops and livestock but an overall decline in income. Much of the income reduction stems from lower supplemental and ad hoc disaster assistance to farmers and ranchers for the coronavirus pandemic compared with 2020. Meanwhile, receipts for actual sales of crops in livestock are seen rising +5.5% ...

Listen in as KVT and Benson Hill CEO, Matt Crisp talk unfiltered about the future of agriculture, some of their favorite investments, new books they are reading, and how they are collectively working to bring premium crop opportunities to growers across the U.S. This is a great conversation with the CEO of the most talked-about ag-tech startup in the industry ...

U.S. hog producers endured some brutal setbacks last year amid the havoc wreaked on supply chains as the Covid-19 pandemic set in. Unfortunately, some producers throughout the Midwest are also dealing with a new and more deadly strain of a common foe, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS). This emerging strain, PRRS 1-4-4, began showing up last fall and so ...

This week our group at iSelect is hosting a "Soil Carbon" deep-dive. There have been a ton of questions circulating as of late, so I thought this was extremely relevant and timely. You can register below to hear the panel discussing the future of soil carbon and the options available to measure and manage this resource, as well as the ...

Barcelona-based start-up "Bioo" has developed a unique way of generating electricity from plants’ photosynthesis that doesn’t do any damage and is 100% renewable. This new biological battery will generate energy from the soil itself as it rains, or is irrigated, and nutrients and microorganisms leach from the ground. I'm told Bioo's tech will direct them into the "biological battery", where ...

Crops don't grow themselves and in the U.S., the labor needed to support the agricultural production is increasingly hard to come by. But agriculture is also an industry that is ideally suited for automation, something Igino Cafiero and Aubrey Donnellan recognized when orchard owners in California expressed interest in their company's autonomous technology. Pivoting from mining to agriculture, Bear Flag ...

There are more than 2 million farms in the United States, about 98% of which are operated by families, individuals, family partnerships, or family corporations, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. About 87% of all agricultural products in America are produced on family ranches or farms. A single farm feeds an average of 166 people per year, both in ...

When Americans talk about how the frontier was "tamed," most are talking about the revolver and repeating rifle that helped settlers secure their territory. Some argue, however, that it was the invention of barbed wire that influenced people to settle in the vast, open spaces. With few trees and other fence building materials, barbed wire is what kept the livestock ...