The growth can partly be attributed to the relative youth of the state’s agriculture industry. It is experiencing the same trajectory that regions like the Midwest and the South saw decades ago. As Amy Pettit, executive director of the Alaska Farmland Trust, put it: “It’s the wild, wild West up here, and if you have access to land, you can grow whatever you want.”

Alaska has the nation’s highest percentage of beginning farmers, with 46 percent of its producers having fewer than 10 years’ experience. Many sell at farmers markets, which have surged since 2006.

The state’s fruits and vegetables boast high sugar content thanks to the “high-latitude agriculture.” Crops are exposed to constant sunlight during peak season and, as a result, develop carbohydrates that are converted to sugars at higher rates. This makes the produce sweeter when harvested.

Source: Politico

USDA reported this week that farmers throughout the Corn Belt are severely behind the five-year average when it comes to planting corn. 

According to John Newton, chief economist for the Farm Bureau Federation, with only 23 percent of the country’s corn planted, farmers are likely to start taking a hard look at soybeans and their prevent-plant premiums.

Newton told Farm Journal’s AgPro that the challenge with planting soybeans is to find a market for them as trade tensions mount.

“We’ve still got old crop beans to sell,” he said. “If we plant additional soybean acres and the market demand for them is limited, we can be looking at soybean prices that are far below the prices that we have now in that $8.50 range.”

“It’s up to each farmer to evaluate that crop insurance coverage with respect to their opportunities,” he said. “I think back to 1993, that was the last time we had a really major flood across the Corn Belt, at that point in time the waters that we saw were really in that July month.”  Source: USDA