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Market Insider Weekly Newsletter

NEWS *The United States and Mexico have reached an agreement to strengthen efforts against the New World screwworm after U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned of potential restrictions on Mexican cattle imports if Mexico did not act more aggressively. Following discussions with ...

Where have all the bees gone?

Bee colony losses across the nation have come to a critical juncture, with newly analyzed data confirming losses of 1.6 million colonies. Commercial beekeepers have sustained an average loss of 62 percent of their hives between June of 2024 and March of 2025, according to data released in ...

Specialist: Don’t graze pastures too early

Cattle producers turning their livestock out to pasture this spring may find that some pasture ground has been impacted by drought conditions and other factors. “Soil moisture is definitely a concern as that will put pressure on many of our perennials, as last year’s conditions will ...

Old iron

Three springs ago, a despicable derecho ravaged our region. We eventually engaged a scrap iron guy to haul away some of the wreckage the storm had created at my parents’ farm. It was gratifying to think that the steel from our ruined grain bins was going to be recycled, perhaps into new grain ...

On balance, I repeat myself

Somewhere along life’s highway most of us learned to balance a checkbook. This task usually involved a pencil, the back of a used envelope, and some basic math. Today, however, a click or two in a second or two delivers that up-to-the-second number. It’s the same for the federal ...

Hart: Cattle prices are strong in 2025

It appears that there’s no limit to what consumers will pay for beef, which is good news for cattle producers, markets indicate. As of May 2, export sales were 25% higher than the previous week, with international interest not waning anytime soon. “If anything, exports haven’t fallen ...

Sharing a love for ag

RUNNELLS — When Doug Pontious and Dawn Refsell first met, they realized they shared a common denominator — their love for agriculture. Refsell grew up on a grain and livestock farm near Wallingford in northwest Iowa with many family members tilling the ground before her. She was active ...

The CommStock Report celebrates 40 years

When reminiscing about how we used to give away Carson City circulated Morgan silver dollars, minted with silver from the Comstock Lode mine, as an incentive to new subscribers, it dawned on me that that was 40 years ago. Those silver dollars are worth about five times what they cost us back ...

The buzz about this life

It’s not that I sit around thinking about bees. It’s just that I interviewed someone about the epidemic of bee colony losses recently, and it got me thinking about the brevity of life. Ours — and theirs. One man on the phone told me the lifespan of a single honey bee is 30 to 45 ...

Life in the attic

You know how it goes. You have your kids, you use all the “stuff,” they outgrow everything, and over time the attic becomes a museum of what was once life in the present. All those things migrated to the attic in due seasons (just in case we needed them again), only to find those things ...