Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
From the Column
Cartel capers
Posted on October 6, 2013
There are two reasons to keep up-to-speed on the fast pace of events in what would seem to be the very dull world of potash.
The first reason is that the key players in this once-tightly controlled market continue–at least temporarily–to loose their grip on it. According to analysts’ prices for this key fertilizers could drop […]
Fixed bayonets
Posted on September 29, 2013
So just what was Congress, and especially, the U.S. House of Representatives, doing when it entered the final week of its high-speed game of chicken with the White House and three out of four Americans who said loudly and clearly that they did not want a government shutdown?
One part of the answer, the political part, […]
You can’t make this up
Posted on September 22, 2013
A month ago an editor friend replied to a draft copy of one of these weekly efforts with the simple email comment: “You’ve got to be kidding.”
My reply assured him I wasn’t kidding because, “No one, not even me, can make this stuff up.”
For example, could you make up the fact that when the circus, […]
High mileage chicken
Posted on September 15, 2013
Just before the Labor Day weekend began Friday, Aug. 30, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced that China was welcome “to export processed, cooked chicken to the United States.”
If USDA hoped this little nugget might get overlooked during summer’s last, languid holiday, that thought was deep-fried by noon when Politico, the fast-rising […]
OK, but how many people?
Posted on September 8, 2013
Our good friends at Progressive Farmer magazine fill 15 pages of their September issue with a well-researched, very well-written “special report” on “Feeding the World.”( http://www.dtnpf-digital.com/#&pageSet=26)
The four-color, four-story package hits all the humane highlights U.S. farmers and ranchers expect in these stories of manifest destiny and when “the world will look to the U.S. to help […]
Shut up, butt out, get lost
Posted on September 1, 2013
On Aug. 27, the late summer heat of Washington, D.C. was spit-roasting locals and tourists alike up and down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Inside the U.S. District Courthouse, a half-block off the main thoroughfare and just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol, however, all anyone from Mexico to Canada could talk about was COOL, the American law that […]
The Other Red Meat
Posted on August 25, 2013
A lean hog is not a fat chicken but the marketing geniuses hired by the National Pork Board sure sold a lotta’ hams, bacons and butts when, in 1987, they began to promote pork as “The Other White Meat.”
Now, 25 years after that brilliant slight of hand, the pork crowd wants to be known as […]
The last supper
Posted on August 18, 2013
The weekly newspaper from my hometown bring news that the small, rural Catholic church near the big southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth will close its doors next year, a casualty, according to its distant bosses, of too few priests and too many parishes.
It’s a judgment day that many of the old timers mostly […]
From Russia with Love
Posted on August 11, 2013
The July 30 news that Uralkali, the huge Russian potash producer, was pulling out of the global fertilizer cartel might be that nation’s richest gift to American farmers since the Great Grain Robbery in 1972.
Unlike the grain-buying deal that carried grain prices to 125-year highs 41 Julys ago, this July’s move will drain potash prices […]
Time to Make Hay
Posted on July 28, 2013
As this July forever fades into this August and the sweaty, hardworking part of high summer slides into the sleepier, dog days of late summer, our hired hands in Washington, D.C. have less than 20 legislative days to put up a year’s worth of hay before Congressional winter begins September 30.
They won’t make it. The […]