Russia Sparks Fears of World Wheat Shortages

Russia has suffered a savage cut of one-third in its 2010 grain production, expected to be down to 65 million tonnes from a forecast 95 million tonnes. Wheat is down 27% to 45 million tonnes, most of which will now be required at home for human and livestock consumption.

World Markets – NZ Field Days

Nations keen to secure their future food supplies flocked to the New Zealand National Agricultural Fieldays this year, led by China, whose imports from NZ are rocketing upwards.

World Markets – The Far East

Like a whirling dervish at Baba al Shams desert restaurant, outside Dubai, the Middle East market for dairy products never stands still.
Occasionally it might pause to re-gather momentum, but surges off again, in times of plenty and of disruption, in war and in peace.
The global financial crisis might have left giant holes in the ground and untenanted skyscrapers littering Dubai, but the Middle East's appetite for dairy products is undiminished.

Beef Markets

by Hugh Stringleman

Shortages of dairy products and beef are showing up in better milk and meat prices for farmers in the main exporting countries.

World Fertiliser Markets

Astronomical price rises for fertilisers during 2008 were a warning of permanently higher prices in future, industry watchdogs and agricultural commentators have said.

Aberdeen Angus in the USA

Angus cattle enthusiasts have “out-commercialised” their Hereford brothers and convinced much of the big beef industry in the United States to go black, believes 6666 Ranch ambassador “Boots” O'Neal. He told a group of visiting international journalists on a tour of West Texas that his historic ranch of 40,000ha was pure Hereford until the mid 1990s, when the manager ordered a breeding switch to Angus.

Dr Norman Borlaug

A plant breeder who some have called the most positively influential man of the 20th Century has died in Dallas, Texas.
Dr Norman Borlaug, born on an Iowa farm in 1914, developed high-yielding,
short-strawed wheats in Mexican research stations which created the Green Revolution.

World Markets

Dust bowl to renewable energy production in one lifetime –

that's the latest story from the Texas panhandle on the High Plains of the United States. A wind farming boom in

West Texas is turning the settler's curse, almost constant wind, into an asset requiring almost no effort on behalf

of the land owner.