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 […]
The USDA says the hay supply on May 1st was below year ago levels. The total of 16.797 million tons was down 1.239 million tons on the year, due to lower production and while supplies did improve in some areas, those could be pulled dramatically lower later this year, especially in drought-stricken portions of the Plains, which would push prices higher. Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Texas all had at […]
Rhubarb is in season—look for it now at your local farmers market or in the produce section of your grocery store. As part of the buckwheat family, rhubarb is technically a vegetable. But, A US Customs Court ruling in 1947 in New York made it an official fruit in the United States. Rhubarb is typically in season in the Midwest from April through June. A staple in many farmstead gardens, […]
Looking ahead, the 6- to 10-day outlook calls for the likelihood of near- or above-normal temperatures and near- or above-normal rainfall across most of the country. Cooler-than-normal conditions will be confined to the nation’s northern tier, from the Pacific Northwest to northern Minnesota. Meanwhile, wetter-than-normal weather should prevail from Washington State to the Great Lakes region, and southward into the southeastern U.S. ...
