August Crop Production Report Offers Bright Outlook for Soybeans, Cotton

Aug 14, 2026

By Mary Hightower

The August Crop Production report revealed sizeable and surprising acreage increases in soybeans, cotton and long-grain rice, as well as the potential for record-breaking soybean yields.

Wednesday’s report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service gave industry analysts its first boots-on-the-ground look at this year’s acres, based on late July grower surveys.

NASS reported 3.45 million acres of soybeans in Arkansas, up from the 3.2 million in the June Acreage report.

Arkansas cotton acres grew from June’s 470,000 to 560,000. Corn fell from 830,000 acres in the June report to 760,000 acres. Total rice acres rose from 851,000 to 901,000 thanks to a 50,000-acre increase in long-grain rice acres.

RICE

Extension Rice Agronomist Jarrod Hardke said there was a lot to unpack in this month’s report.

“I was expecting rice acres to land between 800,000 and the 850,000 estimated in the June Acreage report,” Hardke said. “I was low on that estimate given the jump to 900,000 acres.”

Scott Stiles, extension economics program associate for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, said that “even with the increase in rice acres, they are still the lowest since 1977.”

However, “the 50,000-acre increase this month in long-grain rice is really a surprise. I didn’t see that one coming,” Stiles said.

“There were some in the industry who felt like there might be more acres found and clearly they were right, but I don't think anyone was prepared for a 50,000-acre increase in long-grain over the June report,” Hardke said.

Rice yield was projected to be 7,450 pounds per acre, down 30 pounds from last year.

Source : uada.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids