Brownfield

New Zealand has invoked dispute settlement proceedings against Canada under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP agreement.  The Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand issued a statement saying Canada’s approach to trade agreement dairy quotas breaks the rules and severely restricts market access.  Chairman Malcolm Bailey says Canadian domestic processors sit on unused dairy quota allocation and have no interest in giving consumers access to New […]

A specialty cheese plant is being acquired by Sargento Foods. Plymouth, Wisconsin based Sargento says they’ve signed an agreement to add Baker Cheese Factory in St. Cloud, Wisconsin to their family. Baker Cheese Factory is a four-generation business that started in 1916 and is a leading on-the-go mozzarella string cheese producer selling products in all 50 states.  They employ 250 people. The terms of the deal have not been announced. […]

An east-central Illinois farmer is working double time to capitalize on a planting window. KJ Johnson said he’s about half done with soybeans and a quarter done with corn planting. And he tells Brownfield if he’s able to duck forecasted rains this weekend… “If we could just keep rolling, I think we’ve got a good shot at getting the vast majority of this crop in here in the next three, […]

Farmers are assessing damage from a derecho that damaged parts of the Western Corn Belt on Thursday. “All of a sudden it hit and I couldn’t see.  It turned like it was black as midnight.” Northeast Nebraska farmer Jim Miller tells Brownfield he was planting when a wall of dust quickly closed in. “I turned the lights on the tractor and I couldn’t see 20 feet in front of the […]

A storm system currently centered over western North Dakota will drift northward and weaken, although windy weather will continue Friday across Montana and the Dakotas.  The storm’s trailing cold front—draped across the nation’s midsection early Friday—will drift eastward, eventually interacting with a pool of tropical moisture over the middle and southern Atlantic States.  A secondary cold front will cross the Midwest during the weekend.  Five-day rainfall totals could reach 1 […]

Across the Corn Belt, cooler, breezy conditions are overspreading the upper Midwest, where many fields remain too wet for planting.  Warmth lingers, however, across the central and eastern Corn Belt, favoring corn and soybean planting in areas where fields have dried enough to support farm machinery. On the Plains, early-season heat continues across much of Oklahoma and Texas, maintaining significant stress on rangeland, pastures, winter grains, and emerging summer crops.  […]

Cottonseed production climbed higher in 2021. The USDA says 5.323 million tons of cottonseed were produced, up 855,000 from 2020, with 2.521 million tons sold to oil mills, 69,400 used for planting, and 2.802 million tons used for other purposes, including exports, feed use, and inter-farm sales. Upland cotton production was 17.191 million bales last year, an increase of more than 3 million from the previous year. Comparisons for applicable […]

A growing biofuels industry is signaling the need for expanded soybean processing capacity in the U.S. In this episode of Managing for Profit, Clean Fuels Alliance America CEO Donnell Rehagen discusses the expanded feedstocks and soybean processing capacity needed to meet the industry vision of reaching six billion gallons by 2030. For more information visit cleanfuels.org. ...

Purdue University’s latest Consumer Food Insights Report shows 60 percent of consumers are concerned about the impact of highly pathogenic avian influenza on food prices.   Jayson Lusk, distinguished professor and head of ag economics with Purdue, says the goal was to gauge consumer concerns on the more than 30 million losses due to the virus.   “A little less than half said that they had heard of the recent […]