Posted on February 22, 2023
If your best international customer–someone who accounts for 27 percent of your overseas sales–gave you three years to change the recipe of what it buys from you, it’s a safe bet you’d work together to meet their needs and deadline.
Not Big Agbiz, however, which is pushing, pressing, and prodding the Biden Administration to squeeze Mexico, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Posted on December 13, 2022
Journalism, like baseball, aging, and bridesmaids, is often about the numbers. Sometimes big numbers are good, other times small numbers are better. Either way, numbers usually define our work, our families, and our lives in more ways than we care to count.
And they can surprise us, too.
Like in early November when the International Food Policy […]
Posted on November 11, 2022
Even at first glance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) recently announced $3-billion-dollar “Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities” sounds like doublespeak, an Orwellian invention that reverses the meaning of words.
Or, more plainly, how can today’s commodity-centered, industrialized agriculture be remotely “climate-smart” when everyone in the food business readily acknowledges it’s an oil-gulping, climate-changing juggernaut?
The short, truthful […]
Posted on November 11, 2022
A scientist friend recently noted that at today’s rate of consumption, the world is environmentally and economically sustainable for roughly 1 billion people. “That means with the world’s population of 8 billion,” he half-joked, “you’re a goner.”
Right, just not right now; let nature take its course, eh?
Recent population trends, however, show that nature might already […]
Posted on November 11, 2022
If you think U.S. politics are too polarized, too anger-driven, and too polluted by big money, take a quick look at the train wreck that United Kingdom politics has become to see what’s in store for us if we don’t regain our collective goodwill soon.
On July 7, the straw-haired, scandal-ridden Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned. […]
Posted on October 28, 2022
It usually goes without notice or comment, but three of the planet’s key elements–carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen–sit like ducks in row as Element Six, Seven, and Eight, respectively, on the Periodic Table.
None is more important than the others and yet, if there’s a first among equals, it would be nitrogen as a prescient report from […]
Posted on October 28, 2022
On Nov. 6, 2018, 12 million Californians voted, by a 63-to-37-percent majority, to establish minimum welfare standards for livestock and poultry products–chiefly eggs, pork, and veal–sold in the nation’s most populous state.
The initiative, called Proposition 12 (Prop 12), was an emphatic endorsement of two previous actions (one by voters in 2008; the other by […]
Posted on October 28, 2022
Most of American agriculture sees Africa as one vast nation and one vast market. It is, of course, neither.
Africa, in fact, has more nations (54), more languages (over 2,000), and more cultures (3,000-plus), than any other continent on Earth. It’s also the world’s second largest and second most populous continent with three times the people […]