Find the Fed Confounding? That's OK

Imagine if aliens in a spacecraft were studying the United States from above. Their conclusion, I expect, would be that the single most important decision these inscrutable humans make each year is whether to plant corn, soybeans or wheat. No decision, year after year, transforms more square miles of American land than the choice farmers make about which crops to grow. In some years, those aliens would see huge swaths of tight green rows of soybean; in others, more tall corn with yellow tufts; in others, an unusual abundance of wheat in, well, amber waves. Earlier this month, Rick Stern, who farms 1,500 acres in central New Jersey with his father, told me that he had just spent weeks making this very decision. He carefully studied the global market reports to learn about recent yields in Argentina and Brazil, America's leading rivals for soybean exports. He grew up watching his father and grandfather face the same dilemma each fall, using as much information as they could scrape together.