Donald Trump may want to “Make America Great Again” but his just-proposed 2018 budget contains no plans to make rural America great again. In fact, according to the Trump administration’s budget blueprint, American farmers, ranchers, and down-on-their-luck citizens must achieve greatness with trillions less so it and Congress can bestow a trillion-dollar tax cut on
Opinion: Trump’s butcher shop
Comment: Agriculture’s greatest innovation
Farms are still dangerous, but they’ve got a lot better over the years
In my youth, May brought two noticeable changes to the big Lutheran Church my family faithfully attended. The first was heat. No building on earth better held daytime heat from Mother’s Day through Reformation Day than that century-old house of worship. The second was the season’s short-sleeved parade of lost limbs, a brutal testament to
Opinion: Pass the biscuits and the buck
Politicians would rather score hollow partisan points these days than make hard decisions and do their jobs
Leave it to the language experts at England’s Oxford Dictionaries to come up with a two-word “Word of the Year” for 2016. That (those) word(s) is (are) “post-truth.” Post-truth, explain the Oxford experts, is “defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to
Sonny’s big adventure
The putative U.S. agriculture secretary has a tall order ahead of him to boost trade
Those Wisconsin dairy cows at the centre of another trade kettle now boiling between the United States and Canada, a friend suggests, aren’t really black and white Holsteins. They’re tiny, yellow canaries, he opines, and their tweets — not President Donald J. Trump’s — are a warning that America’s reign as the world’s ag export
There goes the neighbourhood
Farmers and ranchers pride themselves on neighbourliness, and rightly so. Rare is the season, after all, when the local newspaper or radio station doesn’t carry a lump-in-the-throat story explaining how neighbours of an ill or injured member of a farm or ranch family gathered for a day or two to do a month or two’s
The auctioneer’s song
For someone who rarely attended auctions, my father somehow managed to host or co-host four different auctions in the last 20 or so years of his long life. The first, held in the mid-1990s, was a dispersal sale for the 100 or so Holstein cows, heifers, and calves that had remained on the dairy farm
New boss, same brawls
The fate of the U.S. Farm Bill is far from certain in this new landscape
The Trump administration’s turtle-slow start with the Republican-led Congress bodes ill for what it and Republicans said would be a busy legislative year. Tax reform, replacing Obamacare, raising the debt ceiling, and a 2018 budget all await initial action. The GOP chairmen of the House and Senate ag committees, however, aren’t waiting on any White
Promises made, promises kept
U.S. farmers are reaping the whirlwind of their bargain with Trump
Of all the words used to describe President Donald J. Trump during his first weeks in office — bold, boastful, alternative facts — here are two that almost no person or pundit uttered: promise keeper. Love him or loathe him, Trump took no time in checking off key items from his unconventional campaign’s list of
Comment: Hard numbers and hard politics
Low crop prices and trade uncertainty are a trouble combination looming for 2017
The calendar may have changed but the numbers all U.S. farmers will work with this new year are little different from the numbers everyone worked with last year. For example, 2016’s corn production was baked-in last fall and so too are most of 2017’s options. We grew a staggering 15.3 billion bu. last year, will
As the year closes, some troubling numbers
Wall Street, the 'Trump bump' and the near future for commodity markets
If it’s all about the numbers, a journalist’s stock-in-trade, what are the numbers telling this journalist as 2016 fades and 2017 rises? First, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Plowprint Report, issued Nov. 16, “Since 2009, 53 million acres of grasslands — an area the size of Kansas — have been converted to cropland
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
