The U.S. farm machinery and equipment market experienced challenges across many fronts in 2025. Recent data suggests many new and used equipment sales categories continued to decline last year. Additionally,…

Now would seem to be a good time to think seriously about the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). A few simple modifications might provide an important release valve for the pressures building up against row-crop farmers. The consequences of missing this opportunity could be dire for many farmers, while also ultimately very expensive for the American taxpayer. The results of inaction are likely to be painful and produce long lasting damage.

A particularly controversial part of the EPA proposals for the RFS in 2026-27 is the limitation of imported biofuel and feedstock to 50% of the RINs generated by domestic biofuel and feedstock. There has been widespread reporting in recent weeks that the so-called “half RIN” proposal may be eliminated in the final rulemaking. This article projects biomass-based diesel production and feed-stock use for 2026-2027 without the half-RIN provision and higher biomass-based diesel RVOs.

The new higher subsidies for the Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO) and Enhanced Coverage Option (ECO) have generated significant interest among farmers. We recently released the Insurance Evaluator to help farmers make decisions concerning the use of SCO and ECO. Today’s article addresses three common questions that we have received relative to ECO and SCO.

Brazil’s rise as a dominant force in global soybean markets has become a central concern for U.S. producers, with 44% indicating in January they were “very concerned” about the competitiveness of U.S. soybean exports relative to Brazil. Since surpassing the U.S. as the world’s largest soybean producer in 2018, Brazil has continued to expand its presence in global export markets. This article compares the U.S. and Brazilian soybean sectors using farm-level production cost data from 2020 to 2024.

Over the last ten years, when we look at the costs of producing corn versus soybeans, it has been more profitable economically to produce soybeans than corn, except for 2021 and 2022. This explains the general downward trend in the percentage of corn acres in crop rotations in Illinois. Over the last 30 years, we have seen a shift to more corn acres until the 2007 to 2012 time period and since that period, the percentage of acres in the crop rotation planted to corn has decreased until about 2020.