Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Farm Bill
September Slips Away and So Do Solutions
Posted on September 27, 2018
There are never enough days in September for farmers, ranchers, and pennant-chasing baseball teams. Every day, whether spent in a combine, pasture or batter’s box, brings change to what’s real today and what’s possible tomorrow.
And it happens fast; September days don’t pass, they evaporate.
Congress, however, seems not to notice days, months or even possibilities. It […]
‘A Fool’s Errand for U.S. Policymakers’
Posted on September 19, 2018
While U.S. farmers and ranchers spent August fretting over escalating tariffs and retreating markets, two ag policy experts used the month to publish a series of five columns that artfully—and courageously—skinned most of agriculture’s sacred cows even as they planted new policy ideas for farm and ranch success.
(All five columns are posted at www.agpolicy.org/articles18.htm under […]
Checkbooks, Guns, and Baloney
Posted on August 10, 2018
The day U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced the White House plan to spread $12 billion of taxpayer salve on its festering tariff wound, November soybean futures ended their day completely unimpressed—down a sleepy 2.5 cents.
Farmers echoed the market reaction; they, too, were unimpressed with the bailout. “Trade, not aid,” was their polite, but […]
America’s Farming Soul
Posted on August 3, 2018
Sometimes it’s even hard for me to believe what I read in the newspaper. The latest “someone-really-said-that?” moment arrived courtesy of The Milkweed, the sharp-penned, monthly dairy newspaper owned and edited by Peter Hardin in Brooklyn, WI.
In its July 2018 edition, Milkweed writer Jan Shepel highlighted the controversy fueled by Marin Bozic, a dairy foods […]
It’s Hard to Tell: Is it 2018 or 2012 or Worse?
Posted on August 3, 2018
Every July, Congress begins to pack its collective bag to escape the scorching heat and suffocating humidity of Capitol Hill. And that’s just inside the Senate and House; outside it’s even worse.
Trapped in this year’s pressure cooker is the 2018 Farm Bill. While the Senate and House each passed their versions earlier this summer, neither […]
All Mud, No Zen
Posted on June 14, 2018
Success in sports, business, and politics requires skilled leaders who know their jobs and know how to fold disparate talents and personalities into something greater than the logical sum of its parts.
Take Phil Jackson, a North Dakota high school basketball star, who coached two different teams to 11 National Basketball Association championships between 1991 and […]
The Winning Losers
Posted on May 30, 2018
There’s something fundamentally wrong with a legislative process that delivers a Farm Bill so deeply flawed that groups as politically diverse as the ruby red Heritage Foundation and the ocean blue Environmental Working Group (EWG) join forces to publicly condemn it.
And yet on May 8, EWG’s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Scott Faber moderated […]
Might Over Right
Posted on May 16, 2018
One of the clearest memories I have as a second grade student is looking north from my classroom windows nearly everyday to see fellow second graders, Ricky W. and his sister, Regina, running to school, late as usual, with their arms, feet, and homework flying.
I also remember the two were usually met at the classroom […]
Wisdom Should Come with Age
Posted on May 10, 2018
In May 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus, a Pole living in Prussia, published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, a book that used mathematics and astronomy to postulate how the earth and the then-known planets rotated on their own axes as they orbited a stationary sun. Within days of its printing, however, Copernicus died.
His theory of […]
Plowshares Into Swords
Posted on May 3, 2018
Texan Mike Conaway, the Republican chairman the House Ag Committee, went full cowboy on committee Democrats after he learned all 20 of them would vote no on his 2018 Farm Bill if he presented it with what they said were 20 percent cuts in SNAP, the nation’s $68-billion-a-year Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Conaway’s reaction was like […]
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Great, but one Goliath, Tyson Foods, sold $116 million of meat protein every day in 2020. Easy guess is you’re gonna need a bigger rock, a better slingshot or both. https://t.co/kpXtTDoquP
Great read: Law schools teach ‘market efficiency’ as a core legal tenet when there’s nothing legal about its resulting poverty, hunger & inequality. Markets are political (the ‘political economy’) and today’s lawmaking ensures it. Let’s fix this. https://t.co/Iuut52JMip
Bigger ‘supply chains’ often mean just bigger pockets to pick. Want to make it really easy? Run 40% of all US grain biz thru same software. Wow. https://t.co/QAzBnkLQs2
The only thing more connected than the Iowa pipeline are the Iowans backing it it: political kingmaker Bruce Rastetter, former guv Terry Branstad… and all for ethanol’s ever-shrinking future. Bad idea for a disappearing alternative fuel. https://t.co/0Enw6lyhMR
Gee, Nebraska combines state Depts. of Env. & Energy and this is its result… Who could have ever guessed? https://t.co/azHmfvA35u