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The Trump administration said it would make $4.7 billion in payments to U.S. farmers to offset losses from trade battles rippling across the globe, MarketWatch.com reported. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said yesterday that the funds constitute an initial payment to farmers hit by tariffs from major U.S. trading partners, which have left producers of commodities from soybeans to pork to apples vulnerable during a steep downturn in the agricultural economy. Farmers have been anxiously awaiting details of the aid package the USDA pledged in July. The USDA said then that it would extend up to $12 billion in emergency aid in response to U.S. trading partners’ “unjustified retaliation” to trade policies enacted by Trump. Soybean farmers are slated to get roughly three-fourths of the direct payments, or $3.6 billion, followed by producers of pork, cotton, sorghum, dairy and wheat.

The U.S. government is taking steps to protect agricultural markets from high-frequency traders — a move some say will make little difference down on the farm, the Wall Street Journal reported. Starting on Aug. 1, the Agriculture Department will change how it releases crop and livestock reports. It is an attempt to placate critics who say fast traders are reaping profits in wheat, corn and soybean futures at the expense of slower investors. The agency says computerized traders can currently get its data around two seconds before everyone else — eons in today’s electronic markets. Farmers, ranchers and agribusinesses often rely on futures markets to protect against swings in commodity prices. Some agriculture groups complain that high-speed trading has hurt these markets by increasing volatility and making it tougher for more traditional players to execute trades at good prices.

The owner of a controversial Oregon dairy wants to sell the facility and cattle rather than immediately liquidate the herd as sought by a major creditor, the Sacramento Bee reported. Greg te Velde, owner of Lost Valley Farm in Boardman, has asked a bankruptcy judge for permission hire a real estate broker to sell the dairy and nearly 7,300 acres for $95 million. Roughly 8,750 milk and dry cows and 3,380 heifers would be listed for $14 million under the proposed agreement with Schuil & Associates, a brokerage firm specializing in agriculture. A potential investor may already be interested in the dairy. During a recent court hearing, an attorney for Washington Agri Investments, a limited liability company based in Spokane, Washington, said the firm is looking at buying the property. However, Rabobank — which loaned more than $60 million to te Velde — still wants to hold an auction as soon as possible to sell off Lost Valley Farm's cattle, arguing the herd is losing its worth.

After three fairly wet years, a drought ranging from “severe” to “exceptional” has descended on the southern Great Plains of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the Wall Street Journal reported. Home to one of the nation’s most fertile farming areas — crop production in the Texas region alone generates about $12 billion in economic activity — observers say the drought could punish the agricultural sector, affecting everything from cotton to cattle to farming-equipment sales. “It’s going to be in the billions in terms of crop loss,” said Darren Hudson, director of the International Center for Agricultural Competitiveness at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. A semiarid region, the southern Plains region has seen drought conditions for much of the last decade, but the severity of this latest dry spell is of particular concern. For many farmers here, the sudden falloff in precipitation is reminiscent of the devastating drought of 2011 when Texas agriculture lost $7.6 billion, the worst losses on record in the state.