Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Big Ag
‘Political democracy can endure only as a guardian of economic democracy’
Posted on January 22, 2021
In early 1999, I wrote a column about lions and gazelles.
More precisely, I wrote a column on how, in the 1990s, American livestock farmers had become “gazelles… in the brutal world of global agriculture.”
What that meant was “Every morning the gazelle awakens knowing it must run faster than the fastest lion to live […]
Gambling on the Future of Food and Rural America
Posted on January 22, 2021
Three events on consecutive mid-November days show farmers, ranchers, and all Americans where U.S. 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, IA, literally gambled on employee lives as the coronavirus took root last April.
[…]
What Exactly is China Buying on its U.S. Shopping Spree?
Posted on December 9, 2020
As political winners joust over election spoils, many Americans are tickled pink (or purple) to leave the costliest, most bitter campaign season behind and return to their lives of family, work, and dreams.
For U.S. farmers and ranchers that means a return to three pre-election realities: a strong, export-led rise in grain prices; another winter […]
Big Ag is Counting on a Purple Blue Dog
Posted on November 11, 2020
If there is such a thing as a 76-year-old poster child, Collin Peterson, the chairman of the House Ag Committee, could be the weatherworn face of today’s red-and-blue political divide in rural America. His qualifications for the job are, well, colorful.
For example, he’s a 15-term, incumbent Democrat in a rural Minnesota congressional district […]
Perilous Bounty is a Journey Well Worth Taking
Posted on October 28, 2020
Some books are worth more in your hand and on your shelf than they are as electrons in your e-reader. These books, and their authors, are valued friends and you return to them often for information, advice, and comfort.
Two downsizing moves in the last 15 years have pared my library to a few shelves […]
Election Year Crazy, Sure, But This Is Way Beyond Crazy
Posted on October 28, 2020
Just when you think 2020 can’t possibly get any crazier, autumn arrives with a carload of crazy in tow.
For example, does any farmer or rancher really know what the White House’s recently announced additional $14 billion in ag bailout money is intended to address that the previous $37.2 billion didn’t address?
That’s an honest question because we […]
The Big Meat Gang is Getting Awfully Smelly
Posted on October 14, 2020
In a year of too many dark days, Monday, Sept. 14 was a particularly dark day for every American for two reasons.
First, on Sept. 14, ProPublica, the non-profit, investigatory news group, published a 3,100-word expose’ on how global meatpackers used their clout this spring to get a White House order to keep workers on […]
We’re Not Very Good Students Even When We’re Given the Answers
Posted on October 7, 2020
If experience is the best teacher, then surely we have learned a few important, unforgettable lessons in this otherwise forgettable year.
If it isn’t a good teacher or we are uncaring students, then we’ve squandered most of the year, over $4 trillion, and almost 200,000 lives on lessons still needing to be learned.
That’s not […]
Sixty Days Until the Farm and Food World Shakes
Posted on October 7, 2020
In March 1919, John Reed, an American journalist, published Ten Days that Shook the World, his eyewitness book on one of the new century’s most defining events, the Russian Revolution.
Eighty years later, Reed’s groundbreaking work was still shaking the world. New York University ranked it seventh on its list of the 20th century’s 100 most consequential works. […]
‘How Much Evidence Do You Need to Vaporize a Zombie?’
Posted on September 30, 2020
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 2008 Nobel winner in economics explained in a 2018 column, are “ideas that should have died long ago, yet still keep shambling along, eating politicians’ brains.”
That […]