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Margy Eckelkamp

Margy Eckelkamp is the brand leader for Farm Journal’s Top Producer and The Daily Scoop, specializing in business reporting for CEO farmers and agricultural professionals. She provides actionable intelligence to help operations navigate farmland dynamics, diversified revenue streams and overall profitability. Margy’s expertise spans regulatory and EPA issues, ag retail trends and tech innovations – topics she explores in depth on The Scoop podcast. Her nuanced analysis of modern business management ensures agricultural leaders are equipped to make informed decisions in a rapidly changing economic landscape.

Latest Stories
Meridian Ag Advisor’s Wesley Davis puts data behind 10 puzzles in the 2026 farm economy. Three of them: land values that won’t fall, input costs that won’t ease and a downturn that looks like the 1980s until it doesn’t.
Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek agree on E15 and a Farm Bill. They split on who is responsible for the squeeze on farm margins.
ClearCost CEO Keith Busch says the platform will post state-level delivered prices, hold payment until product moves and, eventually, support hedging, with the redeveloped version due in January.
BNSF says the proposed UP-NS merger would leave captive shippers with fewer options and farm inputs with higher freight costs. Union Pacific says it would open new routes and take trucks off the road.
Sen. Tom Cotton, a farm-raised Republican, faces Hallie Shoffner, a Democrat who closed her family’s Arkansas farm last year, in the top U.S. rice state, where family-farm bankruptcies lead the nation.
The collaboration adds Bayer’s formulation, field testing and commercialization to engineered corn microbes that wait for the root, then switch on. CEO Tim Schnabel puts a commercial product around 2029.
With fertilizer prices elevated, farmers are looking for relief wherever they can find it. The question is whether suspending the Jones Act is a key piece of the puzzle.
Input costs are up $15 billion since February, diesel is roughly double and credit demand at Land O’Lakes’ financing business is already surging for next season, Beth Ford says.
Growers are locking in inputs earlier, paying on terms that run past harvest, and treating credit as part of the agronomic plan instead of a last-minute add-on.
Starting this fall, FBN’s Norm will surface daily, farm-specific insights, and by spring it aims to act on them, with Google supplying the AI models.