Grain nutrient concentrations can vary across the farm and may provide an opportunity to cut input costs this fall. Soil test values can vary due to sampling time and lab procedures; it may be worthwhile to monitor the variability of soil test values by sampling at different timepoints post-harvest and sending the same sample (labeled differently) to the lab before committing to a fertilization strategy this fall.  

Average nitrogen rates used on farms enrolled in Precision Conservation Management (PCM) have varied little across years. The high nitrogen fertilizer prices suggest that application rates above economically optimal levels…

The USDA’s September Hogs and Pigs report places the September 1st inventory of all hogs and pigs at 74.3 million head, up 1.60% from revised estimates for last quarter but…

Lower farmland values have long been considered a competitive advantage for Brazilian agriculture relative to U.S. agriculture (Colussi and Langemeier, 2026). However, strong farm profits, supported by periods of high…

The Policy Design Lab project recently released two updates to the web-based policy visualizations. The first includes further developments for crop insurance, allowing users to visualize data at the county level and by year and/or by crop. The second is a storyboard for soybeans, visualizing background information on soybean trade and utilization. The Illinois Soybean Association helped support the development of the soybeans storyboard. 

Using US land in Farms as the reference, foreign ownership interests amount to 0.67% of the total, and the remaining 99.33% is US owned. Forestland accounts for 88.5% while cropland, pasture, and other agricultural land account for 11.5%. The countries with the largest ownership positions in U.S. agricultural land are Canada and several Western European nations with primary ownership in forestland. Canada is the largest at 2.28 million acres (38%).