Pivotal Issues Blog

By: Raylene Nickel It’s no insurance against setbacks, but having a whole-farm plan in place can help your family stay on course when difficulties unfold. “It’s often tough to communicate as a family because you tend to focus so much on the day-to-day business operations of producing a commodity,” says David Marrison, Ohio State University […]

By: Emma Wilson Tired of traveling to town to submit government forms? The new Farmers.gov website might just save you a trip to the Farm Service Agency (FSA) office. Farmers.gov is a new interactive website recently launched for producers across the country, and it will be crucial in saving farmers time and money. The newly […]

By: Liz Juchems The land is one of the most valuable assets in the farming operation — second only to the people who care for it. Practices like no-tillage and strip-tillage work to protect those assets from erosion of the soil and the land’s value. A new publication series by the Iowa Learning Farms can help […]

By: Tyne Morgan #1: Assess land—is it draining your cash? “My first tip for farmers out there is to really look at each piece of land that you’re operating. Determine if it is a cash flow positive or cash or negative to you. Don’t just look at this year; go back and look at multiple years so […]

By: Kim Mullenix Cold weather has struck the Southeast for the next several days with the most recent weather pattern change bringing arctic-like air to the region. ( Farm Journal ) Cold weather has struck the Southeast for the next several days with the most recent weather pattern change bringing arctic-like air to the region. During […]

By: Mark Dorenkamp A new RaboBank report suggests row crop farmers will have to transform their operations to stay in business. Sterling Liddell, senior vice president for Rabo Research, says the industry needs to go through a metamorphosis to deal with current conditions. Read More

By: Terena Bell There’s not much call for the meat judging team in Manhattan, but kids here should learn how to take soil samples. Maybe if they had, when volunteer melons started growing in the median of Broadway this summer, people would have known whether it was safe to eat them. In a city where […]

By: Jon Stika If you have spent any amount of time around a 3-year-old child, you know that their favorite question is, “Why?” A young child asks this question over and over in order to understand everything in the world around them because everything is new to them. As we mature, we begin to take […]

By: Avinash Nehemiah More than 9 million square miles of the Earth’s surface is covered by farm land. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, neither Europe nor North America have much room for agricultural expansion. With the population expected to grow from today’s 7.6 billion to a staggering 9.8 billion […]

By: Cindy Zimmerman The Iowa Renewable Fuels Association (IRFA) has launched the Monarch Fueling Station Project to help ethanol and biodiesel producers across the state establish monarch butterfly habitats on green spaces surrounding their plants. “Because of their migratory patterns, monarchs need small patches of habitat throughout the state,” said IRFA Executive Director Monte Shaw. […]