From the Column

In the Heat of the Night

Of all the daily chores my father performed on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth, the most vital to me each winter morning was his rekindling of the banked fire in the tall, round wood stove that dominated my mother’s kitchen 60 years ago.

The stove was, no kidding, a Warm Morning model. It was as […]

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Keep Moving, Nothing to See Here

No one was shocked recently when the General Accountability Office (GAO) announced the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had overpaid farmers billions of dollars during the slapdash tariff-mitigation scheme ordered by the Trump White House in 2018 and 2019.

A couple of billion bucks in government waste is, evidently, chump change when–as in the case of […]

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You Can Only Postpone Reality for So Long

Despite an honest-to-goodness flood of evidence to the contrary, more than 100 million American adults continue to deny the existence of climate change. That’s roughly one third of the country. 

Congress is little better. Currently, 109 House members and 30 senators, or about 26 percent of all members, have cast “doubt on the clear, established scientific […]

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Goodbye 2021’s High Profits, Hello 2022’s High Costs

It always seems odd to use the final week or two of the current year as a platform to view the coming year. How does looking in the rearview mirror give anyone a clear sense of what’s ahead?

That certainly was the case for most ag markets a year ago. For example, almost no one last […]

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Tyson Foods: Meatpacking Isn’t For Chickens

People have strange hobbies.

For example, a Great Plains friend of mine once trained a chicken to play dead. Remarkably, on command, his chicken would take a whole-body flop that could have taught Steve Martin a thing or two about physical comedy.

Another friend, a retired professor, is (unsurprisingly, really) even more iconoclastic: he reads Securities and Exchange Commission […]

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Pod Save the American Farm

It’s an ever more uncomfortable fact for journalists like me that 67 percent of today’s media-consuming Americans do not have one paid-for subscription to anything.

Even more striking, 87 percent of the Baby Boomer generation–we of gray hair and paid subscriptions–use free, electronic media like Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts everyday. Only Gen Z, the 18-to-25 year-old youngsters who actually remember […]

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The Smartest Person in the Room

We all know a few people who think of themselves as the smartest person in the room. We also know a handful of people who actually are the smartest person in the room.

Neil Harl was the latter; he was the smartest person in the room wherever he went and everyone either already knew it or quickly discovered […]

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Lost Angeles and Long Beached

Not many people or events lead both the New York Times and CBS’s 60 Minutes television broadcast on the same day. The still-building mess at many American ports, however, pulled off that rare feat Sunday, Nov. 14, by simply being the biggest rat’s nest anyone in port management, railroading, trucking, or the West Coast ag exporting business has ever […]

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Too Much Money, Too Much Drift, Too Much Grift

The federal government can spend more money in 10 minutes than Congress, its watchdog, can track in 10 years. Still, Congressional oversight–as late and limited as it often is–remains a vital element of government.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis proved just how vital in two reports released in October: Tens of millions in […]

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Mother Nature Doesn’t Do ‘Net Zero’

One rainy November day 20 or so years ago, the lovely Catherine and I were hopelessly lost in the streets and lanes of Glasgow, Scotland while searching for an art museum. By the time we finally conceded defeat and hailed a taxi to take us there, we were soaked, shivering, and couldn’t have cared less […]

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