Tulare County, California, is the number one ag-producing county in the United States for 2022. While Fresno County, California, reported a record $8 billion haul for 2022, it didn’t beat Tulare County’s $8.6 billion report. Both counties benefited from improved market prices and continue to corner the market in the top spots in the nation for ag production.

Add in Kern County, California, at number three, and the Central Valley counties are a combined agriculture and economic powerhouse valued at $24.4 billion. Putting this in perspective, three California counties account for 44 percent of California’s total ag production value of $55.8 billion. Tulare County has a growing population of 479,112 and includes an area of 4,863 square miles.

The fertile valley floor in the Western half of the county has allowed Tulare County to become the top producer of agricultural commodities in the United States, while the Eastern half is comprised of mostly public lands.

The Environmental Protection Agency Monday announced $3.7 million in grant funding to two institutions to establish research centers. The facilities will address children’s cumulative health impacts from agricultural and non-chemical exposures.

Children in underserved, rural agricultural communities face increased health risks due to the combination of agricultural, according to the EPA. The agency says there is an urgent need to investigate the cumulative health impacts of chemical and non-chemical exposures for children in these communities. EPA spokesperson Chris Frey says, “EPA is funding these research centers to identify effective, science-based options aimed at reducing early childhood health disparities in agricultural communities.”

Florida State University will use the funding to evaluate chemical and psychosocial stressors and promote children’s cumulative health in rural and agricultural communities. The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center will use the grants to mitigate the chemical and non-chemical stressors that affect school absenteeism caused by gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases in Texas and Oklahoma.

Health officials have euthanized a Minnesota commercial turkey flock after tests confirmed it was positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza. The flock contained approximately 140,000 birds and is the state’s first confirmed case of the disease since last spring. A

s is typically the case during spring or fall, officials say the disease is likely connected to the seasonal migration of wild birds. Commercial flocks in South Dakota and Utah have also tested positive for the virus. Michael Crusan, spokesman for the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, says now is the time for producers to keep up with biosecurity measures and keep the area around their animals clean.

Minnesota Public Radio says poultry farmers should be on the lookout for birds that eat or drink less than normal and a drop in egg production, depression, or sudden death. Last year, HPAI cost America’s poultry producers almost 59 million birds in 47 states.

Mississippi River water levels are still at an all-time low near Memphis and set a record for the second straight year. The low levels are causing a twofold problem as barge traffic is still significantly disrupted, and saltwater is moving up the river in Louisiana, threatening drinking water supplies for thousands.

The National Weather Service recently said the water level at Memphis fell to a record-low elevation of minus 11.5 feet. This year’s record is significantly lower than last year. In October 2022, the Mississippi dropped to a minus 10.81 feet. Several other records were set at various stops along the river system, including Cairo, Illinois, on the Ohio River, which was at a level of minus 4.5 feet. New Madrid, Missouri, recently dropped to minus 6.4 feet.

The low water level is causing concern about barge traffic availability during the U.S. harvest when staple Midwest crops are transported to ports for shipping.

American farms reported record cash receipts of $555 billion from the sales of all commodities in 2022. This beat the previous high from 2014 by 3.1 percent after adjusting both amounts for inflation and was 28 percent above the 20-year average level.

The 2022 record cash receipts primarily resulted from the strength of 2022 commodity prices, although production levels in 2022 were also strong. Cash receipts from crops amounted to $288 billion, while receipts from all animals and animal products totaled $267 billion. Operations selling meat animals like cattle, calves, and hogs, reported $121 billion in cash receipts in 2022, 18 percent higher than the 20-year average.

Farm operations with feed crops (primarily corn) reported $105 billion in cash sales, 53 percent higher than the 20-year average. Poultry and egg receipts were $80 billion, 67 percent higher than the average. Oilseed crop receipts were $68 billion, 54 percent higher than the average.

The USDA is extending the application deadline for the Milk Loss Program to Monday, October 30. That will allow more time for eligible dairy farmers to apply for much-needed weather-related disaster recovery assistance.

Administered by the Farm Service Agency, MLP compensates dairy producers who, because of qualifying weather events, dumped or removed milk without compensation from the commercial milk market in calendar years 2020, 2021, and 2022. Eligible causes of losses also include the consequences of those weather events, such as power outages, impassable roads, and infrastructure losses. FSA opened enrollment on September 11.

“We recognize that MLP benefits are critical to the financial recovery of dairy operations significantly impacted by weather-related disasters that inhibited their ability to deliver or store milk in one or even multiple years,” says FSA Administrator Zach Ducheneaux. Most producers who’ve participated in prior FSA programs likely already have all the information they’ll need on file.

Most consumers appear to prefer brand-name beverages over generic or store-brand beverages. That’s according to the September 2023 Consumer Food Insights Report.

The Purdue University report further indicates that consumers make this choice even when presented with a sizable price discount on generic or store brand names. In contrast, most survey respondents said they weren’t willing to pay a premium for brand-name meat, fruits, or vegetables. Not surprisingly, households making less than $50,000 a year were more price sensitive when presented with two generic or store-brand discounts. The survey also shows the consumer food inflation estimate of 6.3 percent continues to diverge from the government’s consumer price index of food inflation at 4.3 percent.

While consumers with the lowest incomes already choose more generic brands over name brands, this disparity tends to grow quickly when the discount on generic or store-brand foods is doubled from 15 percent to 30 percent.

How much does the weekly drought monitor distort thinking about the potential harvest in rural America? That’s a question the staff at Agricultural Economic Insights tried to answer in a recent study.

AEI Economist Dave Widmar talks about the model they put together this spring to find some answers. He says, “In the past, we’ve looked at the relationship between the percentage of the country in drought and the final yield, and there’s just not a good strong relationship between those two variables contrary to what we want to think we looked at those maps. At the beginning of this year, the model we worked on was an innovative way of thinking about drought. The takeaway here is that a lot of times, it’s the change in drought conditions that might tell us more about the yield impact than the drought magnitude in and of itself, and that makes sense. If we get timely rains, the drought conditions might persist, but the crop could still be moving forward. But if the drought is magnifying, that signals deteriorating crops. If the drought is improving, maybe the crops are improving, so that was the genesis of this.”

He talks about what they learned from their study. Widmar says, “While the model results were not necessarily thrilled with, what we did learn from the model, even though drought conditions in June of this year were arguably worse than they were in June of 2012, this model was telling us we had to keep an eye on the change in drought conditions. And what we saw this year is that the drought conditions didn’t get worse. They, in some cases, abated a little bit. They subsided, and so that is part of the story.”

Widmar says their yield-drought model came up with some surprising yield predictions for 2023. “We were looking at what would this model have predicted relative to a trendline and, given the situation that we didn’t see the drought getting worse or the drought conditions getting better, this model shows something that was closer to trend normal than what we have seen. So right now, we have a corn yield that’s seven-plus bushels away from the trend line in that model, so it wasn’t nearly as aggressive in pulling down those corn yields. But again, we have only one data point like this, and that was 2012, and 2012 got a lot worse. We had a pretty significant drought on our hands in June, and the conditions slightly improved. But as I mentioned earlier, depending on where you were in the Corn Belt, some parts of the Corn Belt got significantly better. Some of them got a little bit worse. So, national trends versus state-level conditions are really important to try to untangle in the future.”

AEI came up with a corn yield of 184.8 bushels an acre, higher than the current USDA prediction of 173.0. The soybean model predicted 53.6 bushels per acre, also well above the current USDA yield prediction of 49.6 bushels.

For more information, go to aei.ag.