Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Rural America
Milk Shake-Up Just Beginning with Dean’s Downfall
Posted on December 18, 2019
While many in the U.S. dairy sector focus on why the nation’s largest milk bottler, Dean Foods, filed for bankruptcy Nov. 12, the smart money—if there is any smart money left after four years of crushingly low milk prices—is focused on what’s next.
What’s next is what’s always next when your business is built on […]
We’re Not Crazy, The Times Are
Posted on December 18, 2019
Thanksgiving was the kickoff to a month of bookkeeping, depreciation schedules, and checkbook balancing for my parents on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth. It culminated in an afternoon meeting, usually the week after Christmas, where my father would detail the farm’s annual performance to his three, city-dwelling partners and lay out his plans for […]
“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 […]
Walking in the Shadow of Hope
Posted on November 15, 2019
The first obvious sign of the season-long flood is a perfectly level, three-foot high ring of dried mud on the machine shed’s siding. Nature put it there and, in time, will likely wash it away.
Across the road, 100 feet behind a noticeably tilting mailbox, stands the empty, sagging farmhouse of my youth. It […]
Drainers versus Sustainers
Posted on November 7, 2019
Not two miles from my central Illinois home, a farmer’s next crop—a dozen rolls of eight-inch, black plastic drainage pipe—wait to be planted several feet deep in this year’s browning corn stubble.
It’s tiling season in much of the Midwest, that post-harvest period when earth-chewing machines fight weather, mud, and daylight to bury thousands […]
Ag’s Coming Heart Transplant
Posted on October 29, 2019
If government and private estimates are accurate, hundreds of millions of American farm acres will have new owners in the next 15 years.
For example, the National Agricultural Statistics Service, the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) survey takers and record keepers, predicts that 100 million acres of today’s farmland will be sold by its current owners by 2023.
[…]
It Takes a Carpenter
Posted on October 16, 2019
In the early morning fog the other day, I heard a claw hammer’s tap, tap, bam, bam, bam, boom drive a nail into its place for who knows how many years. A moment later, another six, clear, sharp notes cut through the fog and another nail was set for, maybe, a century or more.
[…]
The Plan is No Plan
Posted on October 16, 2019
You know you’re deep in the rabbit hole when bad news—say, a government report that shows steep cuts in anticipated 2019 crop yields—is good news because it will hopefully boost prices. Conversely, when good news arrives, like an unexpected week of perfect September weather, it’s actually bad news because it just drags already low […]
The Enemy of My Enemy Remains an Enemy
Posted on September 26, 2019
Most rural Americans are old enough to remember when their president noted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”
That was, after all, several tariff hikes, dozens of trade meetings, and more than 15,000 presidential tweets ago. It may seem like a lifetime but it was just 19 months ago, on March 2, […]
Before Silage Season, The Hand-Me-Down Season
Posted on September 12, 2019
Sometime in mid-August, well after fair season and just before corn silage season, my brothers and I endured the hand-me-down season on the southern Illinois dairy farm of our youth.
It was just as you suspect. One morning some weeks before school began, my mother watched as we tried on our next older brother’s clothes to […]
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Another fact-dirtying, conscience-cleansing study @TimothyAWise bought for & by an ag lobby group in an effort to stay on the gov’t dole. Instead of inventing useless uses, can we just save the money and enviro cost and grow food, not fuel? https://t.co/NuFgtRUnpl
Mixed feelings? In the real world, the more accurate word used to describe your dilemma is hypocrisy. At least admit that *free trade* isn’t free. Please. https://t.co/k31Vi6W5vB
Only read this eye-opening analysis of our *new* national trade tactics if your current and future business model, like most of US ag, is trade dependent. Otherwise, all good... right? https://t.co/LHDRhLS5VT
Sure. There are 2 entities in the grocery food chain: Walmart and everyone else. In ‘19 it sold $184B in groceries at 4700 US stores by underbidding competitors, suppliers, and employees. Now it’s doing the same w/ farmers. You connect the dots from here. https://t.co/yXLxKaV05P
Great read, important insight that confirms world’s distrustful view of WH trade strategy: The real negotiation begins after a deal is signed. Just ask Canada & Mexico. https://t.co/CVvrc4MWsk
Hey, @JDScholten, as we say in Illinois farm country, the only thing green at Dollar General is our money. https://t.co/ubrDMqurGi