Agility and absorption capacity represent two distinct strategies through which a farm builds resilience (Lippsmeyer and Langemeier, 2023).  Agility is a farm’s ability to spot and exploit market changes in…

Well, the American electorate certainly sent a message in the midterm elections on Tuesday. As of this writing, Democrats have won a substantial majority in the House of Representatives, 252…

October settlement prices of Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) futures contracts are used to set harvest prices on Federal crop insurance products for corn and soybeans in the Midwest.  Harvest prices are $4.75 per bushel for corn and $12.63 per bushel for soybeans. Both are above their projected prices, which are $4.62 for corn and $11.09 for soybeans.

Soybean farmers in both countries have little control over the prices they receive. Because individual farms sell in the same global market, their ability to compete depends largely on how much it costs them to produce a crop. This article compares what nine typical farms in the U.S. and Brazil spent on seed, fertilizer, and pesticides over five years, showing where input costs differ between the two countries and discussing factors that may explain those differences.

A recent article examined differences in liquidity and repayment capacity for different sized crop farms (Langemeier, 2026).  This article examines trends in the operating profit margins, asset turnover ratios, and…

Non-real estate farm loan volume at commercial banks fell 25.0% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2026. A sharp contraction in average loan sizes drove the decline, even as the total number of loan originations increased. Average maturities shortened across categories, most notably for farm machinery and equipment financing, while interest rates on these loans eased modestly from 2025 levels yet remained well above what they were in 2020.