How specialty crop labor shapes fresh food prices
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
Ranking farm capital expenditures when cash is scarce
With USDA ERS forecasting 2026 net farm income at $153.4 billion, most operations face a capital queue — a documented ranking method beats first-come-first-served spending.
Tanya Brooks
How to read USDA crop reports without overreacting
Editorial Staff
What the FAA requires before a drone can spray your fields
Editorial StaffAnalysis & Opinion
What grain basis measures, and why it swings by region
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.
What the FDA's pushed-back food traceability deadline means now
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.
What a Farm Storage Facility Loan costs, and who qualifies
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.
Women-owned farm businesses keep growing, census data shows
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.
Agribusiness
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What 100% bonus depreciation means for your next equipment purchase
Isabel DuarteThe economics of drought resilience on ranches
Drought forces ranchers into a documented sequence of costly decisions, depopulate, buy feed, or haul water, and the operations that fare best are those that made resilience investments before the dry year.
Isabel DuarteStrategy
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How prevented planting payments are calculated under crop insurance
Tanya BrooksWhat basis means for the price your elevator actually pays
Editorial StaffFood
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Dairy processing consolidation enters a building phase
Gabriela MontoyaWhat a food recall actually costs the industry
Direct 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 MontoyaIndustry News
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USDA's August 2025 WASDE sized a big corn crop
Isabel DuarteAgtech funding in 2026 holds steady, unevenly distributed
Agtech 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 DuarteBusiness News
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Precision livestock adoption grows, USDA finds real returns
Tanya BrooksWhy organic price premiums are narrowing for crop farmers
Organic 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 BrooksAgricultural Trade & Production
Explore the data · Source: U.S. Census Bureau