Editors' Notebook

I just finished taping our year-end Reporter's Notebook video segments. Associate Managing Editor Elaine Shein and I just churned through the DTN newsroom's picks of the 10 most important stories in agriculture and discussed briefly why we thought they were the top 10. You'll be seeing those stories on our online, mobile and satellite products in the coming days.

These videos are, admittedly, a review of a review. And navel gazing on the subject of navel gazing can most assuredly limit your view.

The view that struck me though, as Elaine was quizzing me about the significance of various subjects, was that we don't have a lot of finality in any of our 2013 Top 10 story candidates. I struggled, while the digital camera recorded, to talk in terms of 2013 without giving a nod to ongoing coverage and consideration of those same topics in 2014. There's a lot of unfinished business out there, it seems.

Farm Bill done? Nope, not yet, despite an entire calendar year of debate, discussion, and hand wringing. What of immigration law, the real status of the Renewable Fuels Standard, the fate of farm income as everything from input prices to tax laws shift? Stay tuned, more on those subjects yet to come.

Are grain yields back to becoming more predictable, or rather, are we getting better at guessing how increasingly odd weather patterns influence today's hybrids and varieties? Let me get back to you on that next fall, if you don't mind.

Even one of the oddest stories of the year, the sudden appearance of glyphosate-resistant wheat in one corner of a fallow field in Oregon, remains essentially a mystery yet to be resolved. And a renewed concern, speaking of the biotech world, that the disconnect in grain trait approvals for key customers such as China could pressure export markets just as domestic demand pushes back, satiated, from the overflowing table of grain supplies.

We have some finite numbers, for what they're worth, on the 2013 grain harvest. We'll have more come the January 10 USDA grain report. Yet much remains unknown about that crop, frozen away in the multitude of on-farm grain storage facilities we've erected in recent years. While grain industry representatives tout a high-quality crop, some handlers worry how grain that was hastily dried and stored, or stored at higher-than-normal moisture levels, will make it through the marketing season. Yet another tale left to play out.

All the uncertainty and unfinished business doesn't inspire jubilation on the money side of agriculture. Rare this fall and winter is a meeting of bankers or economists where a general cautiousness isn't being heightened by a whole clearance rack of other shoes yet to drop.

Which, I guess given the seasonal, cyclical nature of agriculture, it is as it should be. Agriculture, if anything, is a business of managing unknowns. U.S. farmers and agribusiness leaders are accustomed to that. But it would be nice to settle a few things before we head off into the 2014 season. Better luck next year?

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