Good
morning! Welcome to the February 19th
edition of Farm News and Views. This is Bob Bragg.
A
couple of ag headlines bring home how weather often has a negative
impact on farmers and ranchers. For example, an estimated 300,000
head of cattle were drowned due to flooding in northern Queensland,
Australia, last week. The heavy rains have followed a drought that
has plagued farmers and stockman in that state for the past seven
years.
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Good morning! Welcome to
the February 12th edition of farm news and views.
Abraham Lincoln was born in
1809, 210 years ago today, in Hardin
County, in northwestern Kentucky. His father, Thomas, was a
farmer who eked out a living on hard scrabble farms first in
Kentucky, where they lived until Abraham was seven years old. After
his father lost his farm in a land title dispute in 1816, they moved
100 miles northwest to Spenser County Indiana. His mother died there
two years later, and his father remarried in 1819. Abraham grew up
on the Spenser county farm, which probably helped form Abraham’s
work ethic and character. In 1830, Thomas gave up on that densely
wooded, hilly, and rocky farm, and moved his family, with help from
his 21 years son, to Macon County Illinois, south of Decatur.
Abraham then when out on his own and worked at a number of different
jobs before practicing law and entering politics with election to
the Illinois State Legislature in 1834.
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Ridge tilling soybeans in Ohio USDA ARS Photo by Kieth Weller
Good morning. This is Bob Bragg with the February 5th edition of farm news and views.
Trade
has been a hot topic in agricultural news over the past week. When
it was reported last Friday that Chinese negotiators announced that
China would purchase 5 million metric tons of soybeans, the futures
markets reacted with a giddy uptick on soybeans. But by Saturday
morning, the balloon had burst, because everyone realized that there
was no time table associated with the sale. While 5 million tons
of soybeans sounds like a lot of beans, the phantom sale amounted to
less than 4% of 2018’s total crop of 4.6 billion bushels, and
soybean exports to China are already running way behind the quantity
of beans that U.S. farmers had sold to China by this time last year.
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