This week, I published my 400th farmdoc daily article. Four hundred. It still doesn’t quite feel real to type that number. To put that in perspective: 400 articles works out to roughly 27 per year over the past 15 years — about one every other week, year in and year out. When I wrote my first FDD piece in 2011, I never imagined the journey would stretch this far.
Looking back across those 400 articles, the range of topics is honestly a bit startling (you can find the complete list here). The Renewable Fuel Standard has been a steady drumbeat — from RVOs, the blend wall, RIN price dynamics, the renewable diesel boom, and most recently, EPA’s Set 2 final rule. But biofuels are only part of the story. I’ve also written on corn and soybean market fundamentals, late planting, basis behavior, the economics of grain storage, USDA forecast accuracy (WASDE numbers, South American production estimates), crop insurance, and the perennial issue of weather and crop yields.
Some of those pieces have aged well; others, less so. That’s the nature of writing in close to real time about markets that don’t sit still — and frankly, the willingness to be occasionally wrong in public is part of the job description for extension work at a land grant university.
Through it all, what has mattered most is YOU — the reader. Farmers, lenders, traders, policymakers, journalists, fellow academics, students, EPA staff, congressional aides, biofuel plant managers, grain merchandisers, and investment bankers. Your questions, pushback, emails, and “have you thought about this?” notes have shaped this work more than you know. FDD has never been a one-way broadcast; it has been a conversation, and I’m deeply grateful for it.
One personal note for regular readers: a few years ago, I realized I was having trouble recalling the subject of some of my older articles. (Four hundred is, it turns out, a lot of articles.) So I built my own personal tagging system — if you click on my name at the farmdoc daily site, you’ll find every article I’ve written organized by topic. It has been a very handy tool when I’m hunting for a piece on RIN prices, ethanol margins, late planting, or anything else, and I hope it proves useful to you as well. You can find it by going to: farmdoc daily > Authors > Scott Irwin. When you hover over my name, the archive menu will appear.
A huge thanks to all my FDD co-authors over the years (17 in total!), the farmdoc team at Illinois, who make the whole operation run, and my colleagues and administrators in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and the College of ACES for backing this kind of extension work. Extension writing is a long game, and it takes a village.
On to article 401. The markets won’t analyze themselves.
Laurence J. Norton Chair of Agricultural Marketing
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign