Touch the Soil News #2064 (photo – Growing Crops – Public Domain, USDA) The International Grains Council reports on carryover grain stocks from year to year. Carryover is that inventory of grain on hand before new crop comes in. For the grain year 2016/2017 grain stocks ended at 662.9 million metric tonnes. A metric tonne…
Touch the Soil News #2063 (photo – Farmland – courtesy of USDA , Public Domain) The non-profit International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (iPES), which is a thinktank on global food systems recently released a report called the Land Squeeze. Coming out of the report is the impact of financial interest in farmland…
Touch the Soil News #2062 (photo – U.S. Farmland – Courtesy of the USDA, Public Domain) While farmer’s farm, and people in other occupations work, it is inevitable that millions of people are working to build investments for retirement. Every month, billions of dollars that were circulating through wages, are taken out of that loop…
Touch the Soil News #2061 (photo – Growing Crops – Public Domain, USDA) Each year, the USDA puts out a report called Farms and Land in Farms. The data provides trends for growers of all sizes and goes back to 1950. The peak farmland year in America was 1954 when the nation was farming 1,206,335,000…
Touch the Soil News #2060 (photo – Farming in Egypt – CCA SA 4.0 International, Hesham Farouk Ragab) Farmlandgrab brings a story of a public/private partnership in Egypt to reclaim 1.5 million acres of farmland to increase the nation’s agricultural productivity. It is being accomplished in land that has limited water. Part of the larger…
Touch the Soil News #2058 (photo – Soil Blocker – Courtesy of Johnny’s Selected Seeds https://www.johnnyseeds.com/search/?q=soil+blockers&search-button=&lang=en_US) Nursery plants are known for their plastic containers, which are a cost for the grower and a waste for the consumer. Enter the world of Soil Blocking, a process that firms up the soil, so no external plastic forms…
Touch the Soil News #2057 (photo – Farmer’s Market – USDA ) While growing your own food is great for a few items, to grow a full spectrum of produce from most of a household’s needs can be a big undertaking. However, if a number of people got together and each one grew different varieties,…
We can always use new ideas from others, especially when it comes to increasing sales. Farmer’s Markets have become a staple for urban settings. It helps to just walk through a Farmer’s Market and see what everyone is doing or not doing. It also helps to talk to market managers about your ideas. The cost…
Touch the Soil News #2055 (photo – Field Corn – USDA NRCS) Each year, new records are broken in terms of farmland sales as a price per acre. While farmland in terms of sagebrush ridden desert acres is worth much less that prime farmland in Iowa, a driver of prices is that acres being farmed…
Touch the Soil News #2054 (photo – Field Corn – USDA NRCS) Farm Journal’s AgWeb news portal reports on a new field of research that studies roots. In this case it is corn roots. The importance of corn research is that this year there will be 91 million acres of corn planted, making it the…
