A Roadmap to Better Decision Making

Breakfast Moves Back Home, Consumer Shifts Impacting Agriculture Food trends that were predicted at the outset of this year have almost all been upended by the pandemic, especially as they relate to where people are consuming food. You may recall the pre-corona talk about the so-called "breakfast wars" between the big restaurant chains. The battle to gain a slice of ...
Read More

Ohio Farm Girl is "Tough as Nails" on New Reality Show CBS has a new show called "Tough as Nails" that might be the only real "reality" show on television. It's described as a competition series that celebrates everyday Americans who roll up their sleeves and don't think twice about working long hard hours. Contestants have to complete challenges taken ...
Read More

Investors Place $10 Million Bet You'll Eat Wood North Carolina based ag-biotech company Arbiom, using a patented enzyme-based process and fermentation, is turning wood into edible ingredients for both animal and human consumption with a plan they say could eventually give soy, pea, and wheat proteins a run for their money. Their first commercialized product "SylPro" is a single-cell protein ...
Read More

What's Happening with Natural Gas?Natural Gas prices fell to a 31-year low back in June. Now prices have surged breaking out of a narrow trading range with traders pointing to the largest single-day increase in more than 18-months. From my perspective, all of a sudden we have a hotter forecast for the back end of summer and at the same ...
Read More

The United Soybean Board recently revealed a new project that aims to make check-off funded research more readily available to farmers. With the help of the North Central Soybean Research Program, they've redesigned the Soybean Research & Information Network  (SRIN) website, which they describe as a one-stop-shop for all the information the checkoff has discovered through farmer investments across all Qualified State ...
Read More

I've heard a lot of talk this year that looking at corn from the cab of the truck is lot different than what is being seen out in many fields. With such variability, it will be interesting to see how close early yield estimates come to matching what is actually harvested from the field. Of course, some are saying the ...
Read More

A St. Louis-based startup wants to do for farmland what Zillow has done for real estate markets, providing consumers with real-time data to help them make more informed decisions. CIBO's platform uses technology grown out of Michigan State University and is meant to appeal to a wide range of users, including farmers, lenders and agriculture companies. The most appealing aspect ...
Read More

The dairy industry has faced a barrage of disruption in recent years. One threat that's been looming large for some time now is the increasing trend toward in-house milk bottling by supermarkets. This in turn has made large grocers even bigger forces in the milk industry. The trend really started drawing more worried attention around 2018 when Walmart opened its ...
Read More

Ag officials in states across the country have issued warnings about bizarre packages of seeds that appear to be from China. They've apparently just been showing up in people's mailboxes unsolicited by the receivers. Officials are warning residents not to plant any of the seeds as they could be invasive or harmful plants. So far, ag departments in Washington State, ...
Read More

The U.S. House recently passed a piece of legislation designed to tackle the growing rate of suicide in rural communities across the country. The Seeding Rural Resilience Act is supported by a bipartisan group of lawmakers who say the goal is to promote mental wellness and mental health awareness in rural America. American Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall recently endorsed ...
Read More