Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Rural America
Gun closets across America
Posted on August 3, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, July 21, 2024
Like most southern Illinois farms of my youth, my family had a closet filled with guns.
It was just inside the living room and it held my father’s 12-gauge Marlin shotgun, his .22 caliber Remington pump rifle, brother Richard’s single-shot 20-gauge shotgun, brother David’s single-shot 410-shotgun, and my single-shot .22 […]
‘Overalls, two shoes, and a belt’
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 9, 2024
The clothes we wore, like the crops we worked, marked the seasons on the dairy farm of my youth. Coveralls, for example, suggested winter while (ahem) “cover little” meant the hot, steamy southern Illinois summer.
That was especially so for my brothers and me. If we were relegated to kitchen […]
The outrage over White Rural Rage
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 12, 2024
Early in my first year at the Big U, a new friend from Chicago’s south side asked me what he thought was an innocent question. “You’re from southern Illinois,” began Vince, “so why don’t you talk like a hillbilly?”
Like a what? I asked.
“You know,” he explained, “why don’t […]
The failure to learn history’s simple lessons
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 5, 2024
Long before it became a cliché, there were many heroes who never wore capes.
I met one: the rail-thin, then-86 year old Theodore W. Schultz, in his sun-filled, University of Chicago office on a cold, January day in 1989, a decade after he had been awarded a Nobel Memorial […]
USDA still runs the most expensive manure-making program in the world
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, April 14, 2024
If the third time is a charm, Michael Happ might finally make an impression on federal lawmakers and administrators with his fact-filled, 24-page report on the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) continued financing of Big Ag’s big manure habit.
This is Happ’s third detailed look at EQIP, USDA’s nearly 30-year […]
‘Right to Repair’ Fight Between Farmers and Machinery Giants is Just Getting Started
Posted on April 10, 2023
Before a January “memorandum of understanding,” or MOU, on a farmer’s “right to repair” his farm machinery, U.S. equipment makers and their farm and ranch customers were locked in a legal and legislative fight over who could fix today’s complex ag machinery–the customer who owned or leased it, or the maker that designed, built, and […]
Paying the Price for Being Sick, Old, or Poor in Rural America
Posted on April 10, 2023
Rural America is just like the rest of America except it’s older, poorer, and often sicker.
Even worse, if you’re all three in rural America–elderly, poor, and ill–the odds that you will receive proper care from either a government agency or a private provider are dwindling with each passing year.
For proof, here’s how the non-profit National […]
The Great Carbon Boondoggle – Part 2
Posted on February 22, 2023
Bruce Rastetter, Iowa’s longtime agricultural and political power center, has a sixth sense when it comes to making money.
In 1984, according to the Des Moines Register, Rastetter “started feeding hogs on contract… and within two years, 500 head grew to 100,000.” A decade later, his Heartland Pork was the 12th largest hog farm in the […]
The Great Carbon Boondoggle – Part 1
Posted on February 22, 2023
Many policy choices are made on politics alone while other key decision-making elements like cost, science, and even common sense play a lesser, or no, role.
In the old days, this political math resulted in–literally and figuratively–“bridges to nowhere” that cost millions and did little other than raise the local politician’s reelection odds.
Today, these exercises of […]
Unfinished Business: Immigration Reform
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 […]