A Kansas City Fed summit gathered farm and agribusiness executives to map the forces reshaping the next decade. Here is a reference guide to those forces and what each one means for a farm business.
Isabel Duarte · September 26, 2026Third-party apps, ghost kitchens, and delivery fees now sit between growers and the customers who search for food near them.
Gabriela Montoya · September 25, 2026
Fermentation, distillation, and the co-products that make the plant pencil — plus the policy rules that decide how much ethanol the market takes.
Gabriela Montoya · September 20, 2026
Hours, condition notes, and buyer's fees tell you most of what you need to set a ceiling price before the auctioneer starts.
Tanya Brooks · September 18, 2026
With the average U.S. producer at 58.1 years old and most farmland on the edge of a generational transfer, a documented succession process is the difference between a plan and an auction.
Tanya Brooks · July 23, 2026
A predictive agriculture system only changes outcomes when the farmer understands it, believes it, and acts on it — and that is a governance question, not a software one.
Isabel Duarte · September 13, 2026
A rotation is a business commitment made years before the crop is planted. Here is how to sequence it.
Tanya Brooks · September 15, 2026
The federal program pays a share of a crop's guarantee when planting deadlines pass unmet. The percentage, the dates, and the acreage minimum are set in the policy well before a wet spring makes them relevant.
Tanya Brooks · August 21, 2026
The Food Traceability Rule's compliance date moved to July 20, 2028. Here's what that changes — and doesn't — for farms on the Food Traceability List.
Gabriela Montoya · August 15, 2026
Fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts are hand-picked by a workforce that is mostly seasonal and foreign-born, and labor costs now set the floor under much of the produce aisle.
Gabriela Montoya · August 1, 2026The same consolidation that emptied rural creameries is now producing giant specialized plants, and the new capacity map redraws where milk is worth the most.
Gabriela Montoya · July 9, 2026Direct recall costs, lost sales, litigation, and long-term brand damage add up to billions a year across the food system, and the economics push safety investment upstream.
Gabriela Montoya · June 16, 2026
The first survey-based forecast of the 2025/26 season landed near record territory for corn — the operator consequence runs through basis and storage math.
Isabel Duarte · August 24, 2026
Basis is the cash price minus the futures price, and it moved sharply in 2024-2025 — here is what sets it and how to read it.
Isabel Duarte · August 17, 2026Agtech venture funding topped $2 billion in Q2 2026 after 163 startups raised $1.89 billion in Q1, per industry round-ups — flat overall, with the story in where the dollars landed.
Isabel Duarte · August 5, 2026The $12 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance program closed enrollment April 17, 2026, per USDA, and state-level tariff relief programs followed — the documented money now offsetting trade-disruption losses.
Gabriela Montoya · July 14, 2026
USDA caps the facility loan at $500,000 with 15 percent down and terms of three to 12 years. Here is what the rules require, what August 2026 rates were, and how the storage cost compares.
Tanya Brooks · August 12, 2026
Women were 1.22 million of 3.4 million US producers, 36 percent, in the 2022 Census of Agriculture, and 58 percent of farms count at least one woman in decision-making.
Tanya Brooks · August 10, 2026Robotic milking raised dairy net returns 13 percent on average, per USDA ERS report ERR-356 released January 22, 2026, and adoption data shows where the gains concentrate.
Tanya Brooks · July 18, 2026Organic corn traded near $6.50-$7.00 per bushel at the start of the 2025 harvest, per Brownfield reporting, well below the $9.98 average and $5.14 premium of recent USDA-cited data.
Tanya Brooks · June 25, 2026