28 Wishes sells ice cream in Los Angeles. Below 70°F, sales fall about 20%. The weather is out of their hands. Rent isn't.

So the owners started putting about $20 a day into Kalshi weather markets, taking the cold side. The days that keep customers away now pay something back.

This is hedging. Big companies have done it for decades, buying protection against bad weather, fuel spikes and rising rates. It used to take a broker, a trading desk, and an order size no corner shop could meet.

Kalshi opens it up. Contracts on weather, fuel prices, inflation, tariffs and regulation, starting at a few dollars. Take a position on the outcome that would hurt you. If it hits, the payout softens it. If it doesn't, the contract expires and the good month was the point.

See how other owners are doing it at Kalshi.com/hedging

This edition is best viewed on the web — the charts render in full there. Read it online.

Through 23 October the iGrow Intelligence database holds 408 US agriculture transaction records for 2026, against 298 for the same window in 2025. Public program commitments rose to $12.2B from $3.0B, private funding rounds held near flat at 41 against 39, ownership changes climbed from 40 to 50, partnerships and product unveils each grew by more than 40%, and bankruptcies halved from eight companies to four.

This edition covers land-based agriculture and agtech only. Aquaculture, energy and water are tracked separately and excluded here. The scope filter is country United States, and the windows compared are 1 January to 23 October 2026 against 1 January to 23 October 2025, 23 October being the latest date carried in the database.

Two caveats apply to every figure below. First, 2025 records are still being backfilled, so raw volume gaps overstate growth, and this edition leans on shares wherever it can. Second, the database widened into energy and water coverage during 2026, lifting the full US record base from 668 to 1,605. That larger base is not comparable year over year, so the counts here are agriculture records only, classified by sector within each transaction category.

The first figure counts money committed through federal and state agriculture programs announced in the window, whether paid as direct support, grants or program expansions. The second counts only private funding rounds carrying a disclosed amount, across every instrument the database records, so venture equity, debt, convertibles, private placements and fund closes all sit inside it. The third counts mergers and acquisitions together with asset acquisitions, split 38 and 12.

The United States is the largest single country in the database in both years, and its share of all recorded activity rose from 42.3% of 1,580 records to 48.5% of 3,308. Part of that gain reflects the energy and water beats added during 2026, which skew American, so the share overstates how much US agriculture itself grew. Canada took second place in 2026 on 209 records, pushing the Netherlands to third on 133 after it ranked second on 120. The number of countries carrying at least one record rose from 63 to 87.

US buyers and licensors spent the year moving abroad. Lindsay agreed to buy Brazilian hose reel irrigation maker Setorial Irrigação. BRANDT bought Mexican specialty nutrition and bio-solutions manufacturer Altiara to supply Latin America. Cibus licensed gene-edited mustard traits to India’s Crystal Crop Protection and its 14,800-plus distribution partners. GrubMarket bought UK produce distributor JR Holland in its first deal outside the US. The within-country picture cannot be compared, because city tagging now spans the excluded beats.

The crop mix shifted more clearly. Corn-tagged records rose from 8 to 34, soybeans from 8 to 21, cotton from 1 to 11 and rice from 2 to 12, while leafy greens slipped from the top of the 2025 table to sixth, on 8 records from 9. Row and commodity crops now lead a base that controlled-environment produce led a year ago. Some of the gap is tagging granularity, since the database carries Corn and corn, and Soybean and Soybeans, as separate labels; the counts above combine the variants.