An NPR Ag Twofer

First, is there a farmland price bubble?:

"There's probably a higher percentage now of people who are strictly investors, stock market people, money-market-type investors, and ... they're buying all types of land," said Dale Hermreck, a broker for Realty Executives who says he sold $21 million worth of farmland in Kansas last year.
"We have a lot of outside interest from Texas, Chicago, New York," Hermreck said. "I get calls and inquiries all over the United States."
But to University of Missouri agriculture economist Ron Plain all of this sounds a bit like the housing bubble burst of 2006. He is concerned a similar bubble could be happening in farmland.
"You get several years going up faster than that long-term trend of 6 percent [annual increases] and you're then in a situation where you're sort of due for a correction," Plain said. "And the way you correct is pull those land values down — or 'pop the bubble' ... and so there's concern about that and it's kind of reasonable to worry."
Plain said that with mortgage rates at their lowest in 60 years, it's reasonable to expect the cost of borrowing to go up eventually. And if crop prices retreat from record highs, he said, that means "less income per acre and therefore less ability to pay for farmland."
Should a bubble burst, farmland might be harder to sell, especially compared with other more liquid investments. But investors argue that any bubble is still far off, and they believe that farm acreage will remain a solid long-term investment so long as the demand for food continues to grow.

That sounds eerily familiar to something I was hearing in the news in 2004 or 2005.

Then there's this story on refining whey protein:

Tim Opper, Cabot's director of process technology, shows off rooms filled with shiny pipes that funnel the whey through a series of filters.
The pores in these filters are so tiny and precise that they can trap big molecules, like the long chains of amino acids that we call proteins, while allowing water and sugar molecules, which are smaller, to flow right through.
It's all dedicated to dividing this river of whey into increasingly narrow, purified streams of sugar or concentrated protein.
There are even ways to fish out one specific protein, if it's valuable enough. There's a room at this factory devoted to extracting a protein called lactoferrin, which is a protein that helps the body use iron and also fight infection.
Lactoferrin is common in human breast milk, but there's not much in cow's milk. From the 1.6 million pounds of milk that go through this factory every day, the equipment in this room captures just 120 pounds of lactoferrin. "We're just stripping out the single molecule, collecting it, processing it, and drying it into a powder," Opper says.  In bulk form, lactoferrin powder is worth about $225 a pound. When it's packaged as a nutritional supplement and sold in the form of pills, some consumers are paying $50 for just an ounce of it.

A friend of mine specializes in trading whey proteins.  I always talked to him in our neighborhood pub, and when people asked him what he did for a living, he told them he sold expensive white powder by the kilo.  That always made me chuckle.  You know what else this story reminds me off?  Cheese curds.  Mmm, deep fried cheese curds.