Category: Agriculture

Today nearly 30 million acres of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades, which is raising alarm bells in farming communities.

Agriculture automation has the potential to reshape the farming industry in the 2020s and beyond. A new analysis from Bloomberg shows robot farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means tractors will have no cabs – able to spray, plant, plow, and weed cropland with artificial intelligence.

A deadly fungus is spreading from Southeast Asia and wiping out whole plantations of America’s favorite fruit: the banana. The tropical fruit’s popularity is thanks to a few pioneering entrepreneurs, who founded Chiquita under a different name over a century ago. Now, the business they built is at risk of decimation if the fungus reaches Latin America, the source of 97% of the U.S.’ banana imports.

Food production is going to be well below expectations. Millions of bushels of wheat, corn and soybeans have been destroyed by the flooding so far in the Midwest, and thousands of farmers will not be able to plant crops at all this year. Livestock losses experienced will be felt for many years to come and no one is quite sure what final numbers will look like when the livestock losses for all the states affected by the flooding are tallied up. Expect food prices to escalate in the coming months.

The number of farmers filing for bankruptcy has soared to its highest level in a decade. And with high levels of debt, bankruptcies are expected to rise into the 2020s.