Plains

Lawmakers from the Plains and Midwest filed companion bills in the House and Senate to discourage farmers from converting native sod into cropland nationwide by closing a crop insurance loophole. The legislation would require a reduction of crop-insurance subsidies for four years before producers could qualify for them.

For the fifth week in a row, drought has expanded in the winter wheat-growing central and southern U.S. Plains, says USDA's Ag in Drought website. Some 26 percent of winter wheat land is moderate to severe drought, up 2 percentage points in a week.

Months after removing the lesser prairie chicken from its list of threatened species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will "reconsider the status of a grouse found in pockets across the Great Plains," said the Associated Press. The agency agreed to conduct the review after environmentalists filed a petition that argued that emergency protection is needed for the lesser prairie chicken.

The average value of farmland including all land and buildings dipped $10 to $3,010 per acre acre in 2016 from a year earlier, the first such decline in the U.S. since the recession of 2009, the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service reported in its annual Land Values Summary. Land values have been pressured by booming harvests and falling crop prices.

Farmers in the Midwest and Plains - the major regions for corn, wheat and soybean production - are borrowing money to pay short-term operating expenses because shrinking crop income makes it harder to pay cash, according to a survey of ag bankers.

Farm bankers in the central Plains "expect cropland values to fall alongside reduced expectations for farm income" this year, said the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank in its quarterly Agricultural Credit Conditions report.

The Great Plains and U.S. Southwest, the hub of U.S. wheat and cattle production, will face persistent drought during the second half of this century that will be "worse than anything seen" and due primarily to climate change caused by humans, says a study by...

Some 37 percent of the winter wheat area, mainly the southern Plains, mid-South and inland sections of the Pacific Northwest, is under drought, says a monthly summary by USDA chief meteorologist Brad Rippey.

Growers in the southern Plains and the mid-South express sticker shock at the price of the new Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO), created by the 2014 farm law to allow growers to boost their level of revenue protection, says DTN.

Researchers at Texas Tech "found evidence of antibiotics, feedlot-derived bacteria and DNA sequences that encode for antibiotic resistance" in air samples taken near cattle feedlots in the southern High Plains, says Feedstuffs.

Bankers in a 10-state swath from Illinois and Iowa to Colorado and Wyoming "expect 2015 cash rents for farmland to decline to $214 per acre, down significantly from last year's $254," said Creighton University's Rural Mainstreet Index.

Drought will persist or intensify during winter in Washington state, Oregon and the northern two-thirds of California as well as the wheat-growing southern Plains, forecasts the National Weather Service.

Land prices declined in 12 Midwestern and Plains states but held steady or improved slightly in the South according to Farmers National Co, a farm management and real estate company, says AgWeb.

A huge increase in grain production in the Northern Plains over the past decade is an unspoken factor in the transportation snarls reported in the region, says economist David Widmar in the blog Agricultural Economic Insights.

U.S. wheat growers will reap a crop of 1.57 billion bushels, up 14 percent from this year, according to forecaster Lanworth, says Reuters. The increase would be driven by higher yields as the central and southern Plains rebound for devastating drought.

Crop farmers are seeing much lower incomes this year, down by an average 25 percent in the Plains, according to agricultural bankers in the Farm Belt.