soybeans

The motivation for North Dakota farmer Jack Bruns to dig into the niche market for non-GMO soybeans is the same as every farmer when it comes to selecting seeds: "To make more money," says Marketplace. "But they're a lot trickier to manage," with hurdles ranging from weed control and preventing cross-contamination from biotech beans to presenting a spotless product to the buyer.

Special agents from EPA's Criminal Investigation Division served federal search warrants on several locations in Cape Girardeau, Dunklin, New Madrid and Stoddard counties in southeastern Missouri, tied to complaints of crop damage from pesticide drift, said the Daily Dunklin Democrat. The EPA is investigating possible misuse of the herbicide dicamba.

Clover Storenetta Farms, based in northern California, "will become the first major dairy in the United States to sell non-GMO conventional milk," says the San Francisco Chronicle. "With its newest product, Clover is betting that there is also a market for conventional milk produced without GMOs that is cheaper than organic milk."

Just as the spring rally in futures prices brightened farmers' outlook, the summer slump in corn and soybean prices pulled down sharply on the Ag Economy Barometer, say Purdue economists. The monthly survey of producer sentiment fell by 17 points in August for a reading of 95, the lowest since the end of winter.

With the widespread adoption of genetically engineered crops — accounting for 94 percent of all soybeans and 93 percent of all corn in the U.S. in 2015 — the use of the herbicides rose, although insecticide use in corn declined, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University, says the school's newly dedicated Indiana Corn and Soybean Innovation Center "will play a big part" in helping to assure enough food for the rising world population. The center is the first field phenotyping facility in North America.

Prospects for wheat and corn crops brightened in the past month, chiefly in the United States and the former Soviet Union, so the world is headed for "an all-time peak" grain crop of 2.069 billion tonnes, forecast the International Grains Council, based in London. The forecast is a sharp 3 percent larger than in July and portends the largest grain glut on record.

A tiny percentage of Iowa farmers are turning to diversified vegetable and fruit production to augment or replace their fields of corn and soybeans, the Des Moines Register reports. The paper says that the chance for farmers "to diversify their crop mix, receive more income and avoid the price volatility that has squeezed profitability recently for corn and soybean producers can be enticing."

With corn and soybean prices plummeting, and pressure to reduce runoff from fields mounting, some Iowa farmers are turning to oats as a possible solution to both problems, says Harvest Public Media.

With the floodwaters still rising in some parts of Louisiana, a lot of farmers with crops still in the field, as well as some with harvested crops in storage, are facing a total loss, says AgriPulse.

Despite a run of record soybean harvests in the U.S., surging demand from China and other importers is expected to cause the U.S. stockpile to drop below the previous year's level for the first time in three years, Bloomberg reports. "Since 2005, China’s imports of the commodity have more than tripled, and it now buys more than 60 percent of the world’s exports," the news service says. "The demand is primarily driven by its livestock sector as a growing middle class consumes more meat."

Corn production will surge by a hefty 5 percent worldwide, pushing global grain production to within shouting distance of the record set two years ago, said the International Grains Council. Bigger-than-expected wheat and corn crops in the United States will be a factor in the near-record harvest and an expansion in the season-ending "carry over" stocks for the fourth year in a row.

In a decision that removed a roadblock to adoption of a new genetically engineered soybean variety, the European Commission approved import of the Monsanto soybean that is resistant to two types of weedkillers, said Reuters. The soybean went on sale in the United States and Canada this year surrounded by questions about whether there was a market for it.

The Missouri state Agriculture Department has received more than 100 complaints this spring and summer of crop damage from wind-spread "drift" of the herbicide dicamba from neighboring fields, says DTN, saying some growers are using the weedkiller on soybeans although it is not approved. "The hotbed for the off-target and off-label problems appears to be southeast Missouri, northeast Arkansas and northwest Tennessee," said DTN.

Fertilizer runoff could be reduced significantly if row crops such as corn and soybeans are replaced with perennial grasses harvested for biofuel production, say researchers from four Midwestern universities. Nitrogen runoff in the Mississippi River basin, blamed for creation of a "dead zone" each summer in the Gulf of Mexico, could drop 15-20 percent if switchgrass or miscanthus were planted on a quarter of the land now devoted to row crops, according to computer simulations.

U.S. corn exports are climbing for the third year in a row and will be the fourth largest on record this trade year, thanks to the mammoth crop now being harvested and falling market prices, said the Agriculture Department on Thursday. The 15.2 billion-bushel crop would be just a hair smaller than the record set last year.