Happy Tuesday!
Grab your coffee, because today's edition is a bit of a gut check.
We've got flatlining farmland values south of the border, a stat that says more than it should, and a story about a family and 100 dairy cows that'll make you call your dad.
No jokes about weather forecasters today.
Some mornings you just sit with it.
🌾 The Big Bin: Midwest Farmland Values Flatline, and Inflation Ate the Rest
What happened: The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's latest AgLetter shows Midwest farmland values held flat year over year in Q2 2026 across its Seventh District (Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan). Sounds stable. It isn't.
Adjusted for inflation, real values actually dropped 3.7 percent, the steepest real-terms decline for the district since 2016.
Only 5 percent of surveyed lenders expect land values to rise next quarter. 81 percent expect them to hold. 14 percent expect them to fall further.
Why it happened: Two forces are pulling in opposite directions.