Now is the time to be aggressive — not in marketing, financial decisions or crop mix shifts — but in risk management. After years of stagnant prices, the tide has turned.

Mark Hanna has peace of mind because he has a plan. The north-central Iowa farmer is on track to retire in four years, transitioning his farm to his two sons, Andrew and Philip.

For Bryan, Ohio, farmer Glen Newcomer, 2019 was a disaster.

“We only got 20% of our acreage planted because of the severe flooding and heavy rains,” Newcomer recounts.

The teams at AgLaunch and AgVentures Alliance are assembling a network of farmers from the Mid-South through the Midwest to link together precommercial startups with farmers who can provide their acres, data and insights.

Adam Chappell was a slave to pigweed. In 2009, he was on the brink of bankruptcy and facing a go-broke or go-green proposition. Drowning in input costs, Chappell cut bait from conventional agriculture and dived into a bootstrap version of innovative farming.

When Hennig Brand lugged a final, sloshing pail of yellow urine over the cobblestones of a Hamburg street and down to a basement where he’d patiently collected 1,500 gallons of his neighbors’ pee in pots and tubs, the putrid stockpile represented one of the greatest leap forwards in agricultural history—albeit propelled by accident.

Imagine the day you can provide details about each specific field to your seed supplier and they take that information to custom-build the perfect hybrid or variety for each field. Sounds crazy, right? In reality, many seed companies can already do this.

Calving and planting season have been anything but typical for Matthew Raver in Greensburg, Ind. Around March 26, he came down with a fever — and it stuck with him for 12 days.

After years of planning, sketching, discussing and finally quoting prices, Dennis Ivers and his family finally built their “dream” shop. The third-generation corn and soybean farmer and his brother had ‘made do’ with the old shop long enough and four years ago built new.

This winter, Farm Journal Field Agronomist Ken Ferrie has fielded a variety of questions on starter fertilizer – one way to weatherproof early season plant growth, especially when soils are cooler after planting.

A bag of feed crinkles in Samveasna David’s grip as he walks along his parent’s fishpond in Cambodia.

“Never.” Like many farm kids from small towns, Lisa Ahrens Peterson was never going back.

Following a decade with the introduction of societal shifters such as the smartphone and the adoption of robotic milkers, 2020 could be the starting block for the fastest technological race in farming history.