Possible Grocery Store Merger, Rural Investment and USDA Crop Surveys

Possible Grocery Store Merger, Rural Investment and USDA Crop Surveys

America's second and fifth-largest supermarket chains are moving closer to a merger as Safeway shareholders will vote on the sale of the company to Albertsons today. However federal regulators continue to conduct an antitrust review of the deal which would be one of the largest among grocery retailers.

An exciting new avenue for financing for rural America has been created. The Rural Infrastructure Opportunity Fund will promote rural economic development by giving Wall Street investors the opportunity to provide capital for rural America. One of the partners of the Fund is Farm Credit System's CoBank. CoBank CEO Bob Engel shares more

Engel: "If you take a look at the amount of capital available in this country today — it's substantial. When people wake up and look for a project that looks like something they want to do — they don't see it in rural America. Our job is to build that bridge and make that match between those of us who do lend in rural America every day. So that we can find all sorts of different ways to create loans. We can make them alongside of USDA grants and loans; in other cases these are investment grade and we do them just with the private sector. The whole idea of this platform is to simply the process and really identify and match these rural infrastructure projects with the enormous amount of capital that is out there today."

USDA's Gary Crawford reports that the USDA will soon begin to survey selected fields for the next big crop report.

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