🌧 Ida's Ag Impact + Tractor Sales Still Soaring, China's Digi Ag Darling, and more...

Ida has arrived and she’s not a pleasant houseguest.

The storm roared onto U.S. soil Sunday with 150-mph winds, leaving over 1M+ homes and businesses without power. Despite its downgraded status to a tropical storm, Ida continued to wreak havoc on Gulf Coast levees, too.

And for agriculture, the timing is less than ideal.

A bummer for cotton. The fiber crop was on a tear in 2021, showing its best rating in five years with 71% of acres being rated good-to-excellent as of last week. Producers in the Delta and Southeast regions shared that the risk of flood damage to open cotton bolls and desiccating soybeans could crush end-of-season expectations.

Add in potential field flooding that could push field work back weeks and Ida could really make her mark.

Important to note: USDA officials reminded producers in the region of their partnership with FEMA to aid in disaster relief. Their disaster assistance discovery tool even helps find resources specifically targeted to rural and agricultural issues.

One other wild note: Ida was whipping up so much water that a U.S. Geological Survey gauge near New Orleans detected a ‘negative flow’ on the Mississippi River. In other words, the mighty Mississippi was flowing North, backward from its geological norm, an occurrence not seen since Hurricane Isaac in 2012.

Quick Hits

→ Syngenta shows strength. Like many of its crop input competitors, Syngenta had a breakout financial quarter, reporting sales of $7.4B, up 28% from the prior year’s quarter.

→ Negotiation station. Senators are calling on President Biden to quickly fill the empty role of Chief Agricultural Negotiator which would help hold Canada and Mexico to their commitments in the USMCA.

→ Lift the draw bridge. The USDA is creating a ‘foreign animal disease protection zone’ in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to keep African Swine Fever at bay after its discovery in the Dominican Republic.

→ Ag labor liftoff. Farms are on pace to certify over 300,000 workers this year via the H-2A visa program, the most in the program's history.

→ Oh, deer… The U.S. government said on Friday it had confirmed the world's first case of COVID-19 in deer.

→ Buggin' out. Researchers at Penn State are using the pheromones of an insect’s predators - aka ‘the smell of fear’ - to ward off crop-destroying bugs from row crops and permanent crops.

→ Robo-grape imaging. Cornell researchers have developed BlackBird, a robot that can scan grape leaves via high-throughput phenotyping that quickly produces high-resolution images for disease identification.

Farm equipment sales are still in overdrive, a welcome sign for equipment manufacturers.

Commercial tractor sales in the 100+ horsepower category are up 38.2% year-to-date since July 2020 and combine sales are also up 19.2%.

Soundbite: “You look at commodity prices and farmer attitudes and that gives you a pretty good indication of where ag is. I think this (sales trend) is real and not pandemic driven,” noted Curt Blades of the Association of Equipment Manufacturers.

Builders feel it too: “The demand is red hot as our farmers are finally making some money again,” Eric Hansotia, CEO of AGCO, said. “We’re seeing the farmer making money now, (and) they’re refreshing their fleet.”

But supply chain snafus haven’t gone anywhere. “Fortunately, since ag is considered an essential business, a lot of those disruptions we’ve been able to plan for, but it doesn’t make it any easier,” Blades said.

Total tractor inventory has decreased by more than 37% at the end of the second quarter of 2021 compared to 2020.

Kevin Johansen was intimately familiar with challenges posed in the farm labor market and how it was hurting his local, rural community.

So he did something about it.

Enter, AgButler.

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China’s largest ag platform, Pinduoduo, just raked in its first-ever profit. While they’re ringing the cash register, the company is donating the “cha-ching” for ag development.

Pinduoduo has pledged to donate the $2 billion yuan ($309M) Q2 operating profit and all future earnings up to 10 billion yuan ($1.5B) to the development of ag as part of their “10 Billion Agriculture Initiative.” The initiative will target critical needs in ag and rural areas.

Soundbite: “Agriculture has long been at the core of Pinduoduo’s corporate mission and [the Initiative allows] us to deepen our support for agricultural modernization and rural vitalization,” said chairman and CEO Lei Chen.

Backstory: Pinduoduo is an online platform that connects farmers and retailers across China. It’s one of the country’s big three shopping sites - along with Alibaba and JD.com.

Zoom out: China’s online retailers have been pressured to find new growth opportunities after Xi Jinping’s government cracked down on monopolistic practices and renewed scrutiny on data security and online content.

Calls for tech companies to give back and share wealth became...well, very loud. Pinduoduo reacted with a focus on community group buying, agriculture, and infrastructure.