Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Farm Policy
First steps in ag climate fight are honesty and courage, not offsets and credits
Posted on May 13, 2022
Last May, the Canadian farm group National Farmers Union (NFU), submitted a detailed response to the Canadian government’s earlier “Draft Greenhouse Gas Offset Credit System Regulations.” The response, like the government request, went relatively unnoticed in U.S. ag circles.
It shouldn’t have because the 23-page reply by the 200,000-member NFU was as shocking in its brevity […]
‘I used to say FDA stood for foot-dragging artists”
Posted on May 13, 2022
FDA is, of course, government shorthand for the Food and Drug Administration or, as Helena Bottemiller Evich makes crystal clear in a deeply-sourced, richly detailed April 8 exposé, the Food and Drug Administration.
The emphasis is required, explains Bottemiller Evich, a senior editor and ag reporter at Politico, because “a monthslong… investigation” found “that regulating food […]
If futures markets don’t work, your markets won’t work
Posted on May 6, 2022
Contrary to the woeful baying by Big Agbiz, the United States–and any nation with enough money–will not run out of food this year. This can be said without reservation for two reasons.
First, war or no war, there is no global shortage of wheat, the crop today’s Chicken Littles are cluck-cluck clucking about. In the last […]
Big Food Makes Big Ag Look Like a Piker
Posted on May 6, 2022
If you think Big Ag has too few suppliers, too few buyers, and too few farmers and ranchers, you need to meet Big Food. It is big-time big.
Who is Big Food?
That straightforward question was tackled by academics, journalists, and legal professionals in a day-long conference on March 12, titled “Reforming America’s Retail Food Markets,” at […]
Coming war for U.S. crop acres renews food-versus-fuel fight
Posted on May 6, 2022
American farmers are long familiar with acre wars. This regional, late winter scrum is a showdown over how many acres of corn, soybeans, cotton, and wheat acres farmers will plant mainly in the Midwest, Great Plains, and South.
Most years these fights are decided by a variable–and oftentimes volatile–combination of three elements: what market prices are […]
Making Pork Chops Flow Uphill
Posted on February 18, 2022
For more than 40 years my father farmed within a mile of where the Kaskaskia River met the Mississippi deep in southern Illinois. That meant he had two, lifetime partners: the river and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, landlords of the levees that guarded our wedge of the Great American Bottoms.
Dad never argued with […]
Getting MAD, Mutually Assured Digesters, is Always a Bad Idea
Posted on February 11, 2022
If today’s California is what the rest of America will look like tomorrow, you might want to brace yourself for too little water, too much animal manure, and $4.65-per-gallon gasoline.
And, weird, too, because in California these too-little, too-much, and too-expensive elements have been combined to create what was thought to be a partial cure for […]
Keep Moving, Nothing to See Here
Posted on January 26, 2022
No one was shocked recently when the General Accountability Office (GAO) announced the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had overpaid farmers billions of dollars during the slapdash tariff-mitigation scheme ordered by the Trump White House in 2018 and 2019.
A couple of billion bucks in government waste is, evidently, chump change when–as in the case of […]
Goodbye 2021’s High Profits, Hello 2022’s High Costs
Posted on January 21, 2022
It always seems odd to use the final week or two of the current year as a platform to view the coming year. How does looking in the rearview mirror give anyone a clear sense of what’s ahead?
That certainly was the case for most ag markets a year ago. For example, almost no one last […]
Tyson Foods: Meatpacking Isn’t For Chickens
Posted on January 3, 2022
People have strange hobbies.
For example, a Great Plains friend of mine once trained a chicken to play dead. Remarkably, on command, his chicken would take a whole-body flop that could have taught Steve Martin a thing or two about physical comedy.
Another friend, a retired professor, is (unsurprisingly, really) even more iconoclastic: he reads Securities and Exchange Commission […]
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Honest question: What does keeping the seat Dem do for Iowa agriculture, its farmers, and environment? Honest answer: Same thing the Dem Sec. of Ag from Iowa has done last two years-more ethanol, more dirty water, & more Big Ag. https://t.co/rwouHWCQiq
@daswenson @RiverRaccoon, can carbon be sequestered in corn-soy commodity system in drained/tiled fields? If not, doesn’t this one fact alone take most of Iowa and IL crop farmers out of the carbon game (yes, game) before it begins?
Cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits would have far greater impact on rural America than cuts to farm program payments. https://t.co/lc6SN65Jbn