Industry

A couple hundred miles from the nearest big livestock headline, the sale barn is doing exactly what sale barns do best: getting loud, getting dusty and quietly telling you where demand is headed next. Bleat market: Demand for goats and sheep has moved well past the “somebody’s side project” stage. Buyers are showing up with real interest, and small producers are finding that animals once treated like pasture extras can bring serious receipts. The pull is coming from immigrant

Plastic pickle: California’s sweeping packaging law is getting very real for agriculture, and the produce aisle is suddenly checking its calendar like it forgot an appointment. The State Board of Food and Agriculture is stepping into the SB 54 debateas growers warn the first deadlines could arrive before workable alternatives do. Nothing says “fresh strawberries” like policy panic in a clamshell. The clamshell problem: Strawberry shippers rely on PET clamshells for cooling, v

Moo-d point: California dairy producers are staring down a proposed groundwater protection order that could make manure management feel less like nutrient planning and more like a legal escape room with lagoon samples. Dairy groups are urging regulators to simplify the proposed order, warning that overlapping directives, pond requirements and still-fuzzy compliance costs could accelerate closures in the Central Valley. The manure math: The draft dairy order focuses on reducin

All aboard: AGP says the first long-haul U.S. unit train of soybean oil has shipped from Nebraska, giving renewable fuel supply chains a new rail-sized flex. That is a lot of soy oil moving at once, which is either logistics innovation or the most Midwestern train set imaginable. The route: The train left AGP's David City processing facility and headed toward renewable diesel demand on the West Coast. Unit trains move a single commodity in bulk, which can reduce handling and

The gap: A new study is putting hard numbers behind something rural communities have felt for years: living farther from care, services and support is not just inconvenient. It can be deadly. The numbers: In the late 1990s, working-age rural adults were about 9% more likely to die from natural causes than urban adults. By 2019, that gap had widened to 43% more likely. That is not a statistical pothole. That is the county road washing out. The culprit: The researchers point to

The weekly beef export sales sheet showed up with a number so big it needed its own squeeze chute. Big beef number: Net U.S. beef export sales for 2026 delivery hit 126,062 metric tons for the week ended June 25. That was a marketing-year high and almost 500% above the previous week. In a normal market, that would be the kind of demand signal that makes everyone stand up a little straighter. Paperwork pasture: Then the fine print walked in. Much of the jump appeared to come f

U.S. growers can do a lot of things well. Apparently, buying seed and chemistry cheaply is not one of them. Sticker shock: A new corn-grower analysis called Productive but Priced Out puts hard numbers behind a complaint producers have been making for years: the checkout lane looks different depending on which side of the equator you farm. The comparison looked at seed and crop protection costs in the U.S. and Brazil, which is a tidy way to ruin a perfectly good morning coffee

France’s poultry sector just got a terrible reminder that climate adaptation is not a buzzword. It is a barn-level emergency with feathers. Heat lamp, but worse: A late June heatwave killed hundreds of thousands of poultry and overwhelmed carcass collection in major production regions. That is the kind of sentence no farm manager wants to read before coffee. Record roast: The weather was not just uncomfortable. Some areas saw hottest days since national records began in 1947,

Cattle crunch: U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced the SPUR program, short for Strengthening Processing for U.S. Ranchers, with up to $500M aimed at small and mid-size beef processors. That is a big policy steak, even if everyone is still chewing carefully. The problem: Eligible U.S.-owned processors can receive temporary payments to help offset rising cattle acquisition costs while cattle supplies remain historically tight. When cattle cost more and pla

Congress is taking another swing at farm labor reform, which is brave, considering this policy field has eaten more good intentions than a combine with a loose bearing. Glenn “GT” Thompson, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, is moving a fresh attempt to modernize agricultural labor law, with growers hoping this one does not immediately sink into Washington mud. The wrinkle: The Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act is built around the H-2A guestworker program, the le

Food traceability sounds like a dinner-table dream: faster recalls, fewer mystery spinach scares, and supply chains that can actually answer, “Where did this come from?” But a new analysis says the FDA’s tech-enabled vision may also be turning farmers, fishers, retailers and food workers into unpaid data laborers. Welcome to farm-to-spreadsheet. The wrinkle: The paper argues that the rule’s tracking requirements could hit smaller and under-resourced operators hardest. The goa

The U.S. and Iran have an initial deal to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which is great news for anyone who enjoys global shipping lanes not being treated like a geopolitical cattle gate. The wrinkle: Farmers should not expect instant relief. The fertilizer damage has already moved through supply chains, and a reopened waterway does not magically restock every terminal, barge, warehouse and dealer shed. By the numbers: North Dakota State University economists mo