Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Congress
Your local USDA office may soon be your local federal courthouse
Posted on August 3, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, July 14, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 28 ruling to overturn the Chevron deference was a business-favoring decision to upend 40 years of legal precedent and redirect federal power from agencies like the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to the courts and Congress.
Big Ag loved the news. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association […]
Farm Bill politics 2024 lean toward Project 2025
Posted on August 3, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, July 7, 2024
This year, like last year, is a Farm Bill year and this year, like last year, probably won’t deliver any Farm Bill.
The reason is the oldest one in Washington, D.C.: politics. Most Congressional Republicans aren’t interested in passing any bipartisan farm and food assistance bill when they believe a delay might deliver a GOP-controlled House, […]
Hocus pocus and–poof–taxpayers pay for more crop insurance
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 16, 2024
A longstanding complaint here is the utter incomprehensibility of federal milk pricing policy. For years we’ve joked (mostly through tears) that only four people in the world understand its complexity and, worse, not one of them is a dairy farmer.
As if to prove our point, […]
Here comes the 2024 Farm Bill, there goes any 2024 reforms
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 19, 2024
The slowest dance on Capitol Hill, the writing of a new Farm Bill, gained tempo May 1 when both the House and Senate Ag committees released versions of their bills.
The House bill was a broadly worded, five-page “outline;” the Senate’s, a detailed 94-page report. Noting the differences in both heft […]
How to win the SAF game: Part 2
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, April 28, 2024
Federal policymakers and their Big Ag friends have a problem: Their hope to make corn and soybeans the feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) hit a wall when the aviation industry ruled that biofuel from either crop did not meet its “sustainable” guidelines. As such, there would be […]
GOP House hardliners again threaten Farm Bill
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, March 31, 2024
Even when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finds enough baling wire to lash together the votes needed to pass the split, almost six-months late 2023 federal budget, it’s little more than a signal to some of his GOP colleagues to heat up the […]
Ag’s New Normal Includes Trade Deficits, Not Surpluses
Posted on April 10, 2023
Nearly drowned out in all the farm group cheering that U.S. ag exports hit a record high $196 billion last year was the inarguable fact that U.S. ag imports also hit a record-high, $199 billion, or $3 billion more than ag exports.
That’s right, sports fans: during its biggest ag export year ever–when the value of […]
It Will Take Guts to Fix Our Abusive, Cheap Food and Illegal Labor System
Posted on April 10, 2023
Less than a month after the revelation that a Wisconsin-based contractor, Packers Sanitation Services, Inc. (or PSSI), had illegally hired at least 102 teenagers between ages 13 and 17 to clean some of the nation’s most profitable industrial meatpacking plants, one middle school child at the center of the story has, according to a March […]
Any new Farm Bill must navigate the unruly 2023 House GOP–again
Posted on February 22, 2023
As expected, the 2023 Farm Bill express is not running on time. In fact, it didn’t even leave the station when its chief engineer, Pennsylvania Republican and incoming House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson, said it would.
That’s no surprise; it’s Congress, after all.
Indeed, it would have been a big surprise had it started on the […]
Unfinished Business: Immigration Reform
Posted on January 6, 2023
Like the weather, everyone talks about immigration reform but few do much about it.
In fact, do-nothingness is the dominant trait of immigration lawmaking. A Google search of the phrase “ag immigration stalemate” delivers “about 621,000 results in 0.61 seconds” dating back to at least the mid-1990s.
There was, however, a moment of movement last summer when […]