The Christmas tree was a scrub cedar hacked from the edge of the woods that bordered the farm. Big-bulbed lights, strung in barber pole fashion, generated almost as much heat as the nearby wood stove. Yellowed Christmas cards, saved over the years and perched like doves in the untrimmed branches, served as ornaments. “I believe
Comment: Howard’s priceless gift of simple giving
Sometimes those with the least material things have the most true wealth
Comment: The bold choice
The front-runner for U.S. agriculture secretary would be a break with tradition
It’s a challenge to find one person with the combined skills of a farmer, rancher, forester, food aid administrator, tribal leader, attorney, economist, conservationist, miner, insurance expert, food scientist, and finance specialist to fill the about-to-open job of the secretary of agriculture. In fact, that person — described, in part, by the titles of the
Comment: Gambling on the future of food, rural communities
As wealth and power concentrate in the ag sector, the outcomes are getting worse
Three events on consecutive mid-November days show farmers, ranchers, and all citizens where agriculture now is. Event One: On Nov. 18, the Iowa Capital Dispatch, a not-for-profit news website, detailed allegations on how managers at Tyson Food’s hog-killing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, literally gambled on employee lives as the coronavirus took root last April. “In
Comment: Election winds blowing big change in U.S.
In the recent U.S. election, one of the most prominent Dem losers was longtime ag committee chairman Collin Peterson. The race to be the new chair is already underway. The three front-runners — Georgian David Scott, Californian Jim Costa, and Ohioan Marcia Fudge — each represent a different direction. Scott and Fudge are stronger advocates
Comment: Now would be a good time for some honest dishonesty
As the U.S. election looms, it makes one pine for simpler political times
Somewhere in southern Illinois there’s a high school yearbook that contains a photo of me and another student leaning against a classroom wall on either side of a 1972 campaign poster of a smiling Richard Nixon. The caption writer, another student, notes that my buddy and I are “standing” with our man, the then incumbent
Comment: The Big Meat Gang is getting awfully smelly
This U.S. lobby rewrote its country’s COVID response with a bit of pressure on the White House
In a year of too many dark days, Monday, Sept. 14 was a particularly dark day for two reasons. First, on Sept. 14, ProPublica, the non-profit, investigatory news group, published a 3,100-word exposé on how global meat packers used their clout this spring to get a White House order to keep workers on the job
Comment: ‘How much evidence do you need to vaporize a zombie?’
Farm & Food File: U.S. ag trade policy has a ‘zombie idea’ infestation
While “zombie ideas” isn’t a phrase you often see in farm publications, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has popularized it to describe a uniquely American political condition. Zombie ideas, the Nobel Prize-winning economist explained in a 2018 column, are,” ideas that should have died long ago, yet still keep shambling along, eating politicians’ brains.”
Comment: Public investment needs to return public good
Change is coming and farmers need to get ahead of the curve
If the ill-tempered and deadly first half of 2020 had been a first-calf heifer on the dairy farm of my youth, my father would have ticketed it for the freezer a month ago. His yardstick of heifer potential was short: If she lived up to her breeding, she was a “keeper”; if she “put more
Comment: No one ever loves the umpire
As a founder of the rules-based postwar consensus, the U.S. should be leading not pouting
While the coronavirus pandemic was hammering global trade earlier this year, the various bureaucracies devoted to trade barely skipped a beat before returning to their usual grind. For example, the U.S. and the United Kingdom (U.K.) just began talks on a bilateral trade pact prior to the U.K.’s Oct. 31 “Brexit” from the European Union
Laughter is no longer the best medicine
What’s old is periodically new on the well-worn ag policy treadmill
One reason — there were others — for my departure from farm magazine writing was laughter. Let me explain. In the early-1980s, the world, like now, was headed to hell in a hurry and agriculture was leading the parade. Interest rates were a crushing 14 per cent, farmland prices were on their way to plunging
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
