Food, in brief

Chicago wheat touched $7.67 and a half a bushel on Thursday. That is its highest price since July 2023. [1]

The day before, it rose the most the exchange allows in one session: 45 cents, or 6.4%. [1]

The trigger was a report that Russia may step up missile strikes on Ukraine, having decided peace talks had failed. [1]

Loadings at Russian and Ukrainian Black Sea ports had already stopped almost completely. [1][2]

Two ships are due in France in the coming days to load wheat for Egypt. [1]

Egypt is the world's largest wheat buyer. It took more than 80% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine in the first half of this year. [1]

Black Sea and Azov terminals used to handle up to 70% of Russia's roughly 60 million tonnes of yearly grain exports. [2]

Russia has already harvested more than 100 million tonnes of grain, against 141 million in all of 2025. [2]

With no way out, that grain is piling up at home and pushing Russian farm prices down. [2]

Moscow's answer is money. It will drop the grain export tax until December, buy grain for state stores, subsidise rail freight and extend farm loans. [2]

None of that moves a ship. Andrey Sizov of the analysts Sovecon said the measures will not change supply or demand while the ports are shut. [2]

Sending grain out through the Baltic instead adds $30 to $50 a tonne, says the Russian Grain Union's Arkady Zlochevsky. [2]

He expects other routes to recover half the lost southern volume at best. Russia currently ships no grain at all through the Arctic. [2]

The People's Farmer lobby asked the government to plant a smaller winter crop, and to pay farmers for the cut. [2]

The agriculture ministry refused. Deputy minister Maxim Borovoi called a sowing cut a breach of food security. [2]

This lands on an already thin year. The United States is heading for its worst wheat harvest in half a century. [3]

Why it matters. Watch whether Egypt keeps buying outside the Black Sea once loadings resume. A second and third French cargo would show a habit, not an emergency. [1]

The Pro Farmer tour put the national corn yield at 173.2 bushels an acre, well under the USDA's 180.7. Soybeans came in higher, at 53.3. [4][5]

Why it matters. Market advisers now expect further cuts, so the tightest wheat market in three years meets a smaller corn crop. [7]

No corn had reached maturity in five major states by 23 August. Colorado's crop was rated 68% poor or very poor, North Dakota's 41%. [8]

Why it matters. A late crop meets an early frost badly, so the size of this harvest is not settled yet.

The USDA expects Texas farmers to average 32 bushels an acre of soybeans this year, the same as 2025 and among the five weakest states. [6]

Why it matters. The national soybean number is holding up because the weak states are staying weak, not getting worse.

Drought halved the haylage harvest. A bale that cost 500 crowns now costs 2,000, so farms are sending bulls to slaughter early. [9]

Why it matters. Beef prices are already easing as the extra animals arrive. The shortage comes later, when the calves are missing.

The State Water Commission added $2 million after 220 applications in a week emptied the first pot. All but 3.2% of the state is dry or in drought. [10]

Why it matters. The money buys wells and pipelines, not rain, and it pays at most $10,000 a project.

Records were matched or beaten at 50 weather stations since mid-July. China's corn imports are already up 61.3% this year, sorghum 86.2%. [11]

Why it matters. Damaged Chinese grain pulls in more imports, and Beijing has promised $17bn a year of American farm goods, soybeans aside.

Ottawa answered 50% US tariffs with duties of 15% to 50% on the same $20bn of goods, including dairy and farm machinery. [12]

Why it matters. The unspoken threat is fertiliser, and a farm that buys less of it grows less in later harvests. [12]

Washington was due to publish its definition of ultra-processed food this month. It went for budget review instead, after food company bosses lobbied the White House. [13]

Why it matters. Without a definition there is nothing to write a rule against, so the delay does the work of a decision.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine sued on 19 August, saying a hand-picked panel of meat and dairy insiders rewrote the official advice. [14]

Why it matters. The complaint is about process, not nutrition. It asks who was in the room when the advice was written.

Among 17,024 US men surveyed from 2003 to 2023, the heaviest eaters of ultra-processed food had a 24% to 31% higher rate of prostate cancer. [15]

Why it matters. One observational study shows a link, not a cause. But such food is now about 60% of what American adults eat. [15]

A review of 391 state secondary schools found banned crisps and chocolate on sale at 206 of them, and meat products served too often at 224. [16]

Why it matters. Free school meals expand across England next month, so more children eat from these menus, not fewer.

About 57% of what Britain eats is ultra-processed, against 14% in France and a similar figure in Italy, in a new book on British food culture. [17]

Why it matters. It is a reminder that ultra-processed is not a fact about food chemistry. It is a fact about a country's shopping.

Shanghai Ravioli Corporation of Boston recalled 24,900 pounds of frozen buffalo chicken carrying a false inspection mark, made over almost a year. [18]

Why it matters. Nobody has fallen ill. A routine surveillance check found it, which is what routine checks are for.

Alveo Technologies and AgriNerds will combine wild-bird tracking with a 45-minute on-farm test, replacing a two-to-three-day lab wait. [19]

Why it matters. By the time a flock looks sick the virus has usually already left the barn.

Washington raised the subsidy on area add-on cover to 80%. Insured acres rose by 146 million in two years, and subsidies by nearly $3bn. [20]

Why it matters. The public purse now carries a bigger share of a bad harvest than it did in 2024.

Lincolnshire's leader is taking advice on challenging Beacon Fen Energy Park, approved by ministers, saying it takes fertile land out of food production. [21]

Why it matters. Large solar schemes are decided in Westminster, not by the county, and that is most of the argument.

Rabobank estimates world farm productivity is 21% lower than it would have been without climate change, wiping out about seven years of gains. [22]

Why it matters. The advice to food firms has changed from surviving a drought to designing for one.

NASA's ECOSTRESS instrument found plants worldwide close their pores at midday, shifting their peak water use up to two hours earlier in a heatwave. [23]

Why it matters. The plant saves itself by stopping work, so yield is lost on days the field still looks green.

Initiative 308 qualified with more than 205,000 signatures. It would free up to $175m of sporting-goods tax for conservation and wildfire work. [24]

Why it matters. It raises no taxes. It lifts a spending cap, which is how land and water money gets found now.

A Yucatan study found cattle grazed among trees and shrubs give off less methane per unit of feed, and run cooler skin temperatures, than those on bare pasture. [25]

Why it matters. Grazing takes up close to 60% of the world's farmland, so a small change per animal is a large one in total. [25]

APHIS published a roadmap on 26 August putting its New World screwworm response playbook on a quarterly review cycle open to outside comment. [26]

Why it matters. The plan is now treated as a document that keeps changing, rather than one that was finished and filed.

Comparing 2008 to 2016, satellite-based estimates of ammonia from fertiliser ran higher than official inventories, with the gap widest in warm months and on low-input farms. [27]

Why it matters. Ammonia turns into fine particles that harm lungs, so an undercount is a health undercount.

Researchers read 745 samples of ancient dental tartar and found northern Eurasians rarely ate insects, while tropical populations kept genes that digest them more easily. [28]

Why it matters. 1,611 insect species are classed as edible. The obstacle to eating them turns out to be older than any marketing campaign. [28]

A new sequencing method reads the apricot gene block that decides which trees can pollinate each other, replacing a test that often called the wrong version. [29]

Why it matters. Get it wrong and an orchard is planted with trees that cannot fertilise each other, which shows up years later.

Magnum, which holds a fifth of an 85 billion pound global market, was the most shorted large European stock in June on doubts about ice-cream's future. [30]

Why it matters. One in eight Americans now takes a weight-loss drug, and US ice-cream sales fell over the past year. [30]

The Ghana Food Movement runs masterclasses on homegrown, drought-hardy foods like tigernut and moringa in a country that imports at least half its food. [31]

Why it matters. The crops it teaches are the ones that survive the weather Ghana is actually getting.

From 14 August Morocco accepts pork casings from approved US plants, and firms must apply through the inspection service's own system to qualify. [32]

Why it matters. A sausage skin is a reminder that trade access is granted product by product, not country by country.