Hello CALS, and welcome to the spring semester!
It’s always a great pleasure and energizing at the start of each semester to see and feel the hallways, classrooms and labs filled with the buzz of students and the sounds of learning and doing. So good to all be in this enterprise together – to help make the future brighter and better. Our work is no less than that. What a privilege.
Two action items for you all:
- Complete the Board of Regents Free Speech Survey by Feb. 13. See the email sent Jan. 14 from the Iowa Board of Regents for a survey link and additional details.
- Start making your online content digitally accessible to comply with the U.S. Department of Justice's updated digital accessibility regulations. Find additional information and links to training and resources in the What to know about the digital accessibility initiative article.
It's going to be a busy semester, as always, filled with new things and old things still to get done. We’ll have work to do on enrollment, online programming, research proposals and activities, visiting scholars, supporters, partners, agencies and more, the Iowa legislative session to watch, and capital projects to pursue, design and build.
Things are changing, too. Did you know, for example, that in 2000, the average incoming freshman at Iowa State had approximately 9 credits of college credit before starting? And then by fall of 2025, the average incoming freshman at Iowa State had about 22 college credits before starting. That alone changes everything about what we offer and how we work with the next generations of undergraduates. Just one example of changes that sneak up on us.
The latest on the agricultural economy
We have our place too in the overall economy and in this college, as it relates to the farm economy. While there are some in the ag world selling into strong markets, many are not, and everyone buying into a production system is paying higher rates than ever. There is truly a great deal of uncertainty, and perhaps fragility in the national and Iowa agricultural economy. That matters to us, too, in so many ways. Our job is to keep adding value through the thinkers and doers we help educate and through our research and outreach enterprises to discover things and translate them to do good.
The 2025 growing season posed lots of biotic and abiotic challenges for Iowa farmers, yet statewide production was excellent. This is born out in the 2025 Crop Production Annual Summary released by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). The national summary and state summaries are released in January each year. However, the cost/price structure for corn and beans was not helpful, with continuing high input costs (see Estimated Costs of Crop Production in Iowa - 2026), low prices (see Iowa Daily Cash Grain Bids grain report for Jan. 16, 2026) and uncertain current and future markets (see Corn plunges after USDA stuns market with 17 billion bushel crop). Additional information can be found in this U.S. farm economy shows widening cracks as costs rise, jobs vanish article.
2025 Iowa Corn and Soybean Production Highlights (from USDA January 2026)
- 2025 was Iowa’s second-highest corn yield at 210 bushels per acre
- 2025 was Iowa’s all-time record for corn production at 2.77 billion bushels
- 2025 was Iowa’s all-time record soybean yield at 63.5 bushels per acre
- 2025 was Iowa’s third-highest soybean production at 596 million bushels
2025 National Corn and Soybean Production Highlights (from USDA January 2026)
- 2025 set the national all-time corn yield record at 186.5 bushels per acre
- 2025 set the national all-time corn production record at 17.0 billion bushels
- 2025 set the national all-time soybean yield record at 53 bushels per acre
- 2025 was the seventh-highest soybean production at 4.26 billion bushels
All that means is we need to put our heads down and keep on working. We are part of the solution. Have a great week. - Dan
Scenes from CALS
