Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Farm Bill
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
House’s New Ag Boss Doesn’t Offer Much That’s New
Posted on January 6, 2023
While his Republican House colleagues were fighting for votes–and party majority–a week after the Nov. 8 midterm election, Pennsylvania incumbent Glenn Thompson, the ranking GOP member of the House Ag Committee, was basking in the glow of another blowout re-election.
His hammering, 40-point win wasn’t his biggest. That came in 2020 when he won his sixth […]
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. […]
Laughter Is No Longer the Best Medicine
Posted on May 13, 2020
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. U.S. interest rates were a crushing 14 percent, farmland prices were on their way to plunging 40 percent in just five […]
“It’s Going to be a Long Winter”
Posted on December 13, 2019
Mother Nature turned a colorful, late fall into a bitterly cold, early winter as if to prove—after a planting, growing, and harvest season marked by floods, drought, and mud—that she’s still in charge and still not happy.
Not happy about what? No one can say but almost every American from Montana’s Western Slope to Maryland’s […]
The State of The Nation’s Farm and Food Union
Posted on February 27, 2019
The President of the United States should not be the only federal official required to offer the nation’s citizens an annual report on the “State of the Union.”
Every senior department executive—from Cabinet secretaries and the Pentagon chiefs to the Senate’s majority leader and the House speaker—should be required to examine their integral part of […]
Knives, Forks, and Farmers Favor Immigration Reform
Posted on February 21, 2019
When Internal Revenue Service (IRS) workers returned to their jobs Jan. 28 after the recent, 35-day government shutdown, an estimated five million pieces of unopened mail awaited.
Equally daunting, the shutdown coincided with the IRS’s hiring of its annual army of temporary workers to process the impending tax season’s mail. The delay now leaves the […]