Truth, civility, and honesty took a beating in the 2016 U.S. election, but global trade, the campaign’s daily whipping boy, actually grew in the July-September quarter. Moreover, reports the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, an international group that tracks trade, the surge means global trade “may rise over the year as a whole.”
It isn’t broken; don’t fix it
Dwayne Andreas, the FBI, and me
Dwayne Orville Andreas, the pocket-sized hurricane that built a sleepy soybean processor, Archer Daniels Midland Co., into a global giant, died Wednesday, Nov. 16, in a Decatur, Ill. hospital. He was 98. Andreas’s career was as long and profitable as it was remarkable and jaded. Just last week someone again asked me if it was
Elections come and go but we stay
The cold, grey drizzle of November finally found central Illinois on Election Day. No one complained, however, because the warm, dry harvest season had ended weeks before. Fifty or more years ago, that was never the case on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth. In fact, if we were half done with harvest
‘You’re wrong’ is the wrong message
Trying to dictate what products consumers should get or what food companies should supply them is surely a losing tactic
When most of us hear the words, “Have I got a great deal for you!” we grab our wallets because experience suggests any forthcoming deal won’t be great. Similarly, when someone says, “Here’s the straight talk,” our baloney meters redline because we know the coming talk will be about as straight as a hound’s hind
Do we really feed the world?
It’s a moral platitude that papers over a multitude of problems
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is using this harvest season to solidify its reputation as the biggest not-for-profit policy organization American farmers love to hate. The hatred took root in 1995 when EWG published — on something called the Internet — a 10-year, searchable database of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) payments to all American
Livestock’s bleak industrial future
There’s not even a hint of light at the end of the tunnel
The more the American meat and milk sectors industrialize — via integrated contract production, fewer bigger players, machine-centred scale — the more these key parts of American agriculture resemble industry itself: commoditized products, razor-thin margins, and extended periods of steep losses. This shift from what we once quaintly called animal husbandry has also shifted economic
U.S. farmers should vote like it’s 2018
The free enterprise rhetoric of U.S. farmers and farm groups may be about to catch up to them
As this year’s harvest and general election roll into October, key Capitol Hill farm policy players are looking past both events to stake out negotiating territory in the upcoming 2018 Farm Bill fight. It’s not too soon. The Congress elected next month will rewrite the every-five-year law that divvies up nearly $100 billion a year
Comment: Closing the barn door after the fact
Sudden concern about mergers on the part of politicians is too little, too late
One of the oldest truisms agriculture offers is the simple, rock-solid advice that the time to close the barn door is before the cows get out. Closing the door afterwards, as everyone knows, is pointless because the cows are already long gone. Everyone, except of course, the U.S. Congress which, on Sept. 20, hosted a
No trade? No kidding
U.S. presidential election just one sign of global shift from free trade
You know it’s a presidential election year when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issues late-summer press releases where nearly half the ink touts the Obama administration’s past ag successes, even as it announces actual news. On Aug. 1 USDA issued just such a press release; 315 of its 635 words bragged about the White
Brexit: ‘Taking farmers for fools’
U.K. farmers find themselves torn between their innate conservatism and economic interests that may be best served by staying in the EU
With electronic ignition, fuel injection and more computing power than the space shuttle, today’s cars and trucks never backfire. Our politicians — with less horsepower and far less memory — often still do. The latest may be British Prime Minister David Cameron who, during his 2015 re-election campaign, promised British voters a referendum on whetherCyber-Savvy Farmer
