Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Technology
Diversity and Resilience versus Corn and Soybeans
Posted on October 14, 2015
By car, Quebec City, Quebec, is 1,840 miles from Bismarck, ND. I know because in the last two months I have seen every mile of highway between North Dakota’s state capital on the Missouri to Quebec’s provincial capital on the St. Lawrence.
Interestingly, as you drive west to east across arguably some of the New World’s […]
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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A clear-eyed view of American agriculture from an informed outsider. Tough, true, and telling courtesy of @herdyshepherd1 and @CivilEats. https://t.co/jA5rnIh9U3
Thread. At its core, this is why US ag faces an ever-tightening spiral of industrialization: most in academy continue to search for reasons not to change rather than reasons why change is the great imperative. https://t.co/cFap0zjLxp
‘The plan would also increase income taxes for people making over $400,000 in taxable income annually from 37% to 39.6%.’ Oh, those poor Deeres, er, dears… https://t.co/oRRswMOhC8
American farms continue to be fertile fields for hucksters, shysters, and cheats. Unreal. https://t.co/1dLfFGUWYS
Terrific piece that captures Big Ag’s slow-&-dough strategy w/ environmental regs: Unless gov’t pays us to the right thing, we’ll continue to do the wrong thing. Hey, your choice! https://t.co/aeTvAEVEU0
And now, 25 years later, we’re back where we started. Big surprise. https://t.co/J3ZZm2c76Y