Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Farm Policy
Meet Your New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
Posted on August 23, 2018
The only Washington, D.C. area team having a worse year than the Baltimore Orioles, an awful 34-78 on Aug. 6, is big food’s biggest, richest lobbying arm, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, or the GMA.
Most American farmers and ranchers don’t know GMA by its acronym; they do, however, know its work: it was the organizer and […]
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 […]
The Forgotten Lessons of the “Carter Embargo”
Posted on July 27, 2018
Once, when walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague, a friend asked if I knew the story behind the stunning, 14th century marvel under our feet. No, I replied, mostly because my education did not require much European history.
“Then,” my friend replied, “you are not educated.”
It wasn’t snobbery; it was a fact. Most Americans not […]
When Trump Starts Tweeting, Sonny Starts Packing
Posted on July 11, 2018
Prince Edward Island, caressed in eastern Canada’s provincial arms of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, is a lovely place to visit in June. Its sparkling red sand beaches, miles of white-blossomed potato fields, and rolling carpets of lush pasture form a color-soaked postcard for tourists and locals alike.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue caught a […]
Tanning Cowboys’ Hides
Posted on June 14, 2018
Forty years ago Waylon and Willie asked the nation’s mamas not to “let your babies grow up to be cowboys” because “… they’ll never stay home and they’re always alone, even with someone they love.”
That sage advice is even more true after a spring cattle market that’s been too wild to forget and too brutal […]
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 […]
What’s The Matter with Kansas?
Posted on May 24, 2018
For over 100 years, some Kansans have either built or added to their journalism reputation by asking this simple question: What’s the matter with Kansas? The answer, however, is far from simple.
The first to ask was William Allen White, the publisher and editor of the Emporia Gazette. White, a mainstream Republican, posed the question as the […]
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 […]