FYI on Crop

Agriculture is entering a new era – Agriculture 3.0. This new era is not “right” where Agriculture 2.0 was “wrong” any more than the small family farms were “wrong” and the larger farms that replaced them were “right”. Change doesn’t take time for value judgments. But any old timer who lived through the transitions of farming from the 1940s to the 1970s can probably tell you that along the way there was lots of pain and resistance as the old accepted approaches to doing things was replaced by the “new paradigm”. The shift to Agriculture 3.0 will be driven by two big picture changes that are just taking hold:

The UK's biggest fresh milk supplier, Robert Wiseman Dairies, has said it is in talks to be bought out by German-owned yoghurt maker Muller Dairy. Wiseman, which operates seven dairies across the UK and counts the The Co-operative Group, Sainsbury's and Tesco among its customers, has seen its share price rise nearly a third amid takeover speculation. The Glasgow-based company confirmed it was in talks for a cash offer with Muller Dairy UK, which is owned by German-based parent group Theo Muller, but it said there was no certainty of a bid.

In a year of record agricultural earnings in the U.S., Steve Ruh spent a chunk of his income to build what’s become an increasingly common sight at farms across the Midwest -- grain storage bins. The Illinois corn grower started with 250,000 bushels (2 million gallons) of storage capacity in 2009 and added 100,000 this year to avoid wasting precious harvest time in line at grain elevators. He can now hold crops in gluts, hoping to sell at higher prices when grain is scarcer, and is storing half the 400,000-bushel corn crop this season at his farm in Sugar Grove.

Over the past two years, the Department of Agriculture's monthly forecasts of how much farmers will harvest have been off the mark to a greater degree than any other two consecutive years in the last 15, according to a Journal analysis of government data. This year's early-season forecasts also appear to have been way off.

Warren Seely shares how and why he builds working model tractors with Legos.

Over the weekend the Farm Bill Hackathon brought together (in person and virtually) 120 designers, data scientists, developers, marketing professionals, food policy experts, and USDA employees, to “hack” one of the most important pieces of legislation in the U.S. – the Farm Bill. Over the course of 12 hours, 5 graphics and 4 tools were produced, addressing issues as diverse as support to new farmers, the effect of subsidies on global hunger and how to crowdsource Meatless Mondays.

While the long-term bull run in agri commodities remains, we expect prices across the agri complex to ease from their record highs, continuing the downward trajectory since mid-2011,says Luke Chandler, Director of Agri Commodity Markets Research. Prices need to stay at these higher levels through 2012 to encourage farmers to continue expanding production and keep pace with demand growth, and to allow global inventories to rebuild.

Organic crop systems can provide similar yields and much higher economic returns than a conventional corn-soybean rotation, according to thirteen years of data from a side-by-side comparison at Iowa State University’s Neely-Kinyon Research and Demonstration Farm. The Long-Term Agroecological Research Experiment (LTAR) began in 1998 with support from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The LTAR is one of the longest running replicated comparisons in the country. Kathleen Delate, professor in ISU Agronomy and Horticulture, leads the project.

Forced to cut its budget, the Agriculture Department has decided to eliminate dozens of reports, including the annual goat census (current population: three million), and the number of catfish on the nation’s fish farms (177 million, not counting the small fry).

Entertaining video about the dairy cow girls.