Nearby corn futures remain above the early January lows, but continue to struggle under the weight of a number of negative market fundamental factors. Todd Gleason has more on the prospects for higher corn prices later this year.
Check out the latest Quadtrac! pic.twitter.com/5pWBEX0YmH— Todd E. Gleason (@commodityweek) February 17, 2016
I stopped by the grain elevator in Elkhart, Illinois (pop. 403) yesterday. It was quiet. Elkhart Grain owns the...
Posted by Todd E. Gleason on Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Blue Waters Website
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Todd Gleason tours the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Blue Waters facility on the University of Illinois campus.
Quote Summary - The way it will work is as an interactive website. It will actually be running on the web servers sitting at NCSA. We take the data, somebody says we want to make this happen; we want to understand the costs and benefits for an Enterprise Unit in Pike County, or Piatt County, or Champaign County. It runs the numbers automatically. It does the calculations right then. So, it is very sustainable.So big deal you might says, “The FarmDOC (farm-doc) site has been home to the default crop insurance tools farmers in twelve corn and soybean producing states have used for a longtime.” This is true, but those have been hand-updated through an enormous Excel spreadsheet. The realtime calculations are the key and the reason agricultural economist Bruce Sherrick says the FarmDOC team moved the data to NCSA.
Quote Summary - From my perspective, they may not agree, but I think it has been a blast to see how folks who think about that as a normal environment attack a problem like this. By most of the scales they are used to working at we are probably a very small problem. By the scale we are used to working at, this was a really large numeric problem. So to be able to turn it over to somebody that thinks, not in terms of… a few billions is not a large number to somebody used to working in a National Center for Supercomputing applications environment.NCSA is handling the front and back end of the new crop insurance calculators found on the FarmDOC pages. Those calculators must handle large stress loads during the Crop Insurance decision making time from March 1 to March 15. The volume of users coupled with the volume of calculations all done in realtime is mind boggling no more. NCSA will do the heavy lifting to help farmers quickly evaluate their federal crop insurance options.
It’s that time of year when farmers and ranchers buy bulls for their herds. They’re likely sifting through stacks of bull sale catalogs. Todd Gleason has some advice on evaluating a sire’s potential.
On a bright snowy Saturday in Urbana, Illinois about 300 herb enthusiasts gathered for the 17th time. Todd Gleason has more on the annual Herb Day.
Organic food products are sold widely in the United States. The context in which these products are sold give them unique attributes from the consumer perspective. Todd Gleason has more with a University of Illinois agricultural economist on virtues, vices, and shelf space of organic foods.
University of Illinois agricultural policy specialist Jonathan Coppess traveled the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and thought about how agricultural policy brought it into being.
University of Illinois Extension Educator Andy Larson talks about using social media like Facebook and Twitter to build a clientele base for locally grown foods and Know-Your-Farmer campaigns.
Todd Gleason tours the Illinois Speciality Crops, AgroTourism Conference trade show floor to demonstrate diversity within the industry.
A University of Illinois developed online database and marketing tool for farmers has matured into an independent business. MarketMaker is now working to better connect food to consumers through the Illinois Farmers Market Association.