Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Technology
The Chicago Way
Posted on August 4, 2015
It’s an almost poetic coincidence that the day after Greek voters loudly told European technocrats in Brussels and German bankers in Berlin to stuff it, the futures trading CME Group quietly moved its last, open-outcry commodity trading pit from Chicago’s Loop to the perfectly technocratic, globally homeless electronic market.
The Greek “No!” vote, like the Greek-European […]
Why Does Monsanto Want Syngenta?
Posted on August 4, 2015
On the mid-1970s, southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth, we viewed Monsanto Co.’s new, systemic weed killer, Roundup, as a miracle cure to our biggest perennial headache, Johnson grass, the hard-to-kill weed still listed as one of the 10 worst weeds in U.S. agriculture.
The new herbicide wasn’t cheap–$70 per gallon, if memory serves—but it […]
Fix Rural Broadband’s Leaky, Creaky Net
Posted on June 17, 2014
Moving just six miles from a small central Illinois farm town to an even smaller, rural enclave in 2005 took the lovely Catherine and me from a drafty, big house on a leafy, wide street to a tighter, smaller house in a leafy, wide woods. Fabulous.
On the flip side, however, somewhere during that short move […]
Big Ag and Big Data
Posted on December 1, 2013
Everyday, according to the coconut milk-drinking nerds in Silicon Valley, the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of electronic data.
Yes, 2.5 quintillion. Think two, comma, five and then 17 zeroes.
If a picture helps, picture this: If you placed that data on iPads equipped with a 32-gigabyte memory, you would need 57.5 billion iPads to hold it.
Then […]
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This is all but unwatchable; such overwrought, under rendered baloney brings a new level of meaninglessness to today’s ag policy challenges. https://t.co/7eUa5rOsos
We’re running out of years and excuses to not clean up BigAg’s failing environmental record. Solid reporting here on just how badly we’re failing. https://t.co/hjwI5ud6Jd
Teriffic piece that shows just how much influence & money BigPig spends to sustain the unsustainable CAFO side of US meat production. Keep in mind, little of this happens w/out USDA compliance, consent and-too often-money. https://t.co/xdquPjIIO8
When are we as a nation going to understand that this export obsession is literally killing people and the world we live in, not just pigs, cattle & poultry. https://t.co/2CYf75LwFG
As Wallace Stegner noted decades ago: While everyone uses water, only Americans use it up. https://t.co/iSucXdhbzj