Our reason for going to the conference was to report on the contribution of agriculture and forestry to the State of Missouri and each of its counties and federal congressional districts. The presentation I was able to give to the attendees was the culmination of about three months of pleasurable work in which we used many analytical tools...
According to the most recent Weekly Ethanol Plant Production report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. ethanol production reached 1.049 million barrels per day for the week ending January 6th 2017. Correspondingly, weekly ending stocks of fuel ethanol are at 20.009 million barrels as published by EIA's Weekly Supply Estimates report.
The average Iowa farmland value in 2016 decreased to about $7,183/acre according to the 2016 Iowa State University Farmland Survey. The average value of farmland in Iowa has been declining since it hit $8,710/acre in 2013, and it is down 5.9% from last year.
Biodiesel production in the United States in 2015 reached a volume of 1.263 billion gallons, declining 1.2% from the 2014 level (1.278 billion gallons) (see Figure 1). Production from January to September 2016 was up 19.7% to 1.128 billion gallons compared with the same period the previous year (0.943 billion gallons).
How can economic research and engineering work together toward the common goal of informing funding policies and decisions in order to prioritize limited dollars and maximize return on investment?
Most trade agreements are of benefit to agriculture commodity exports, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement was no different. More access to markets previously not available due to high trade restrictions can be beneficial to parties interested in the international commodity markets.
We have done an analysis to understand the relationship among monthly average ethanol prices versus ethanol ending stocks, corn prices, and gasoline prices. The major finding was that all of three predictors, i.e., ethanol ending stocks, corn prices, and gasoline prices, have statistically significant influences on monthly average ethanol prices.
Carl Zulauf and Gary Schnitkey recently published a brief research paper in Farmdoc Daily (FDD) in which they studied the loss ratio of all major insured crops and then individually for each of the four crops. These crops included corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat. Given the national variability in weather, crop insurance purchase patterns (plan, coverage level, etc.) the application of the analysis to Iowa makes sense. This analysis follows.
The recently released NASS harvested yields can be used to estimate the 2016 Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) payments planned for payment in the fall. These estimates will likely vary from the final Farm Service Agency (FSA) yields used to calculate the actual payments this fall and should only be used as approximations.
In 2016, Mexico was the third largest value market for U.S. agricultural products, after China and Canada. The 2016 value of U.S. agricultural exports to Mexico was up 0.8% to $17.9 billion from 2015, but down 7.9% compared with the record value in 2014 ($19.5 billion).
