Gold scores record high, set for best month in 16 years on safe-haven rush…Fears of a government shutdown and growing expectations of further Federal Reserve rate cuts have boosted demand for gold of late, with KCM Trade Chief Market Analyst Tim Waterer noting, “the looming government shutdown creates a haze of uncertainty over the market, which has served to accelerate gold’s gains. The $4,000 level now seems a viable year-end target for gold, whilst market dynamics, such as lower interest rates and ongoing geopolitical hotspots keep working in favor of the precious metal.”
President Donald Trump and his democratic opponents appeared to make little progress at a White House meeting aimed at heading off a government shutdown that could disrupt a wide range of services as soon as Wednesday.
What a government shutdown means for USDA…while there have been no details on a strategy in the event of a shutdown, however Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins indicated at the Ag Outlook Forum in Kansas City, Mo, that they are fully prepared for such, stating, “I believe, sincerely, that the incredible and important programs, especially those that help our farmers, that those will continue – that those shouldn’t be affected by the shutdown, but we are still working out all of the details.”
What we do know:
- The Conservation Reserve Program will cease after today as Congress has not passed farm bill legislation to extend the program beyond FY 2025. A new notice will be issued if new legislation reauthorizes the program.
- A halt on any loan or grant applications at FSA, or any other government agency.
- Data collection for the upcoming Crop Progress and World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) in October will pause.
USDA issues second economic assistance payment…the U.S. Department of Agriculture is issuing a second Emergency Commodity Assistance Program Payment (ECAP) payment to eligible producers for the 2024 crop year. Of the $10 billion in ECAP assistance, USDA’s Farm Service Agency has already provided over $8 billion in payments to eligible producers to mitigate the impacts of increased input costs and falling commodity prices.
“Initial ECAP payments were factored by 85% to ensure that total program payments did not exceed $10 billion in available funding. Since additional funds remain, FSA is issuing a second payment,” according to Brooke Appleton, Deputy Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation. “As producers continue to face market volatility, these payments along with the entire suite of supplemental disaster assistance programs, will help producers navigate market uncertainty, pay down debt for the 2024 crop year and secure financing for the next crop year.”
Payments will automatically be made eligible for producers with approved ECAP applications who received an initial payment. Any application received after Sept. 25, 2025, will receive one lump sum payment. Authorized by the American Relief Act of 2025, these economic relief payments are based on planted and prevented plant crop acres for eligible commodities for the 2024 crop year.
In addition to the over $8 billion in ECAP payments, USDA has issued more than $1 billion in Emergency Livestock Relief Program assistance to livestock producers impacted by drought and federally managed land wildfires in 2023 and 2024, with an additional $1 billion in expected payments for livestock producers impacted by floods and non-federally managed land in wildfires in 2023 and 2024 (ELRP 2023/2023 FW). Livestock producers have until Oct. 31, 2025, to apply for ELRP 2023/2023 FW) assistance.
Producers have also received over $5.4 billion through Stage 1 of the Supplemental Disaster Relief program for indemnified crop losses in 2023 and 2024, SDRP Stage 2 assistance for uncovered, quality and shallow losses will be announced soon.
USDA’s disaster recovery programs complement recently announced state block grant agreements in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia totaling $958 billion in assistance to help agricultural producers with disaster recovery needs. USDA is working with 14 states on block grant agreements.
We need action, not just financial aid…Farm Journal’s Rhonda Brooks writes, Caleb Ragland describes 2026 as a year of extremes, whether the focus is on U.S. trade policy for soybeans or initial crop yields coming out of his Kentucky farm fields.
The frustration in his voice was palpable as he multitasked on Monday – harvesting with one of his three sons, Carter, in the combine and talking with Chip Flory, host of AgriTalk, at the same time.
“Our corn yields are about 25% below APH (average production history) … and soybean yields are kind of all over the board,” says Ragland, a LaRue County, Ky., farmer and president of the American Soybean Association (ASA).
Poor yield outcomes are no surprise, Ragland says, given excessive spring rains that delayed planting. Then, the water faucet shut off mid-summer, just after July 4, and it never turned back on.
“I’m thankful yields aren’t lower than what they are,” he notes. “It’s disappointing but not unexpected.”
The same is true for U.S. soybean trade opportunities.
Ragland says the soybean industry and farmers have a “five-alarm fire” on their hands, due to the lack of sales to China this year. View this story and more on Agweb.com.
Drought persists despite recent rain, forecast points to dry October… Rain finally fell across parts of the Midwest this past week, but for many farmers, it was a case of “too little, too late.” Much of the corn had already died down rather than matured fully before drying down, and soybeans had already finished.
Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien’s Principal Atmospheric Scientist, says the dry August and September is causing moisture problems in both the corn and soybean plants this year, with farmers running into issues with the crop drying down.
“Some people were trying to harvest because the beans finished and the corn didn’t dry down, it died down,” says Snodgrass. “So even when the rain finally showed up, for many farmers it wasn’t the help they needed at the right time.” Click here to view the full story by Tyne Morgan.
Building trust in soil carbon as a climate solution requires stronger evidence…Yale University published a comment in Nature Climate Change, Mark Bradford, the E.H. Harriman Professor of Soils and Ecosystem Ecology and Tale School of the Environment research Scientists, Sara Kuebbing and Alexander Polussa ’25 PHD, together with colleagues Emily Oldfeld ’05, ’11 MESc, ’19 PHD, of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Johnathon Sanderman of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, argue that the scientific evidence supporting soil carbon’s role in mitigating climate change remains too weak to meet the standards required for policy and carbon markets.
The team notes that while models that rely on data from small-plot experiments dominate soil carbo accounting, they can fail to reflect the messy, real-world conditions of working farms. Without more rigorous data collected at the scale of commercial agriculture, they caution, efforts to credit soil carbon with emissions reductions risk overstating the benefits and undermining trust.
Soil carbon sequestration, boosting the amount of organic carbon stored in soils through practices such as cover cropping and reduced tillage is widely viewed as a win-win strategy for climate mitigation and soil heath. The public ranks soil carbon farming just behind tree planting as a preferred climate solution, the authors emphasized, citing a 2025 Communications Earth & Environment Study. International frameworks, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Greenhouse Gas Guidelines and European Union’s Carbon Farming regulations, already incorporate soil carbon into their policies.
However, Bradford and his co-authors caution that enthusiasm has outpaced the evidence. Many current carbon accounting systems rely heavily on process-based ecosystem models that simulate how plants grow and soils cycle carbon. These models are often initialized with limited measurements, then used to predict how practices will affect carbon stocks.
“There is much investment happening right now in soil carbon as a natural climate solution, with big expectations around its potential to mitigate climate change,” said co-other Oldfield, a senior scientist at EDF and a YSE associate research scientist. “A risk is that results we observe among small-plot experiments that are highly controlled don’t pan out across working farms. Large-scale validation can help manage expectations and build confidence that these investments results in real progress on climate.”