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Minnesota company, Plains farm aid group set up hay convoy

More than one-third of Americans do not know that foods with no genetically modified ingredients contain genes, according to the new nationally representative Food Literacy and Engagement Poll we recently conducted at Michigan State University. For the record, all foods contain genes, and so do all people.

Whether it’s loaded and driven, or rolls out by rail, U.S. grains are pouring out of our country and heading for end users in Mexico. “We use raw material [such as] corn, sorghum, wheat and fiber-like cotton seed hulls to make feed for livestock,” said Ricardo Elizondo, owner of Forrajera Elizondo, a family-run feed mill in Monterrey, Mexico. This family-run feed mill said the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) helped make that grain, and in turn their feed competitive. Today, they’re bagging or selling roughly 50 million metric tons of corn and sorghum every year. They’d like to buy more.

Nine months have passed since wildfires charred parts of the central and southern Plains during a three-day span of furious fire. Now, a proposed disaster relief package may offer more help to ranchers in need. The House recently unveiled a disaster aid plan to help cover some of the cost of hurricanes and wildfires the country faced in 2017. House Republicans are releasing an $81 billion disaster aid package, funding that’s nearly twice the request the White House made. The money could be split between a host of federal agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Agriculture. AgDay national reporter Betsy Jibben looks at how producers in Kansas and Oklahoma are recovering and still rebuilding. She talks with Dr. Randall Spare, a veterinarian from the Ashland Veterinary Center, and producers Jenny Betschart in Ashland, Kansas and Bernie Smith in Beaver County, Oklahoma.

The 2017 cattle markets have been interesting, and since November 1, Elaine Kub, author of Mastering the Grain Markets, can describe them in one word: wild.

Several cow shootings are being investigated in South Dakota.

Flooding from Hurricane Harvey is slow to drain in some areas of southwest Louisiana one week after the storm made landfall. Agricultural fields consisting primarily of rice and soybeans are suffering from the most damage.

Snow is falling across a large portion of Montana today, bringing relief to areas struggling to control multiple wildfires. Some mountain passes could see up to 8” of snow by Saturday.

Study: Montana’s average temperature continues to increase

Following two days of falling cattle futures prices, Joe Vaclavik, president of Standard Grain, is calling the market moves a knee-jerk reaction to the latest Cattle on Feed report from the USDA.