Commonly integrated into online college courses, web-based learning management system (LMS) discussion boards have many documented student engagement benefits. Now, LMS platforms automatically generate metrics for assessing student participation in discussion boards, but it is unclear how an instructor may use this information to support students. Additionally, are discussion board analytics a useful indicator of student learning and course performance in an agricultural context? The purpose of this study was to determine if discussion board analytics can be used to predict student performance in an online graduate level agricultural course. Students (N = 25) in an asynchronous online agricultural education research methods course using the Blackboard Ultra LMS were required to post one response weekly to a discussion board prompt related to the week’s topic, then reply to the posts of two of their classmates with comments or questions to further the conversation. Analytics (sentence complexity, lexical variation content words, lexical variation functional words, critical thinking level, word variation, average word count) were recorded for each student’s weekly (14 weeks) discussion board posts and averaged at the end of the semester. Final course grade averages on a 100-point scale were matched with each students’ discussion board analytic scores to determine correlation and predictability. Findings indicated that lexical variation content words, lexical variation functional words, critical thinking level, and average word count were all significantly (p < .05), positively, and moderately or substantially correlated with overall course grade. A linear regression revealed critical thinking level and average word count were both significant predictors of a student's course grade. Instructors of online courses, especially those with large enrollment, can use these automatically generated analytics to quickly perform a formative assessment of students so students who are underperforming can be identified earlier and provided with additional support.