Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Technology
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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AFBF swears by *sound science* & yet all the science behind this study, acc’ing to Reuters, is *...a four-month review by 10 of its farmer members...* The problem here isn’t NASS reports or USDA, it’s AFBF. https://t.co/co35NMHxGd
Great thread: Why ethanol-waivers or not, Supreme Court or not, green deal or not-will not make a comeback. https://t.co/Ul3tIkvuoq
The openness of the stinking campaign sewer in ag is almost more troubling than the sewer itself. It’s an in-your-face pay to play scheme that delivers public goods to private players & is both shameless and shameful at the same time. Nice trick, Kim. https://t.co/c2Y590b04e
The US isn’t the only democratic nation where the ill-intentioned make nation-altering change too quickly for the benefit of a politically privileged few. Brexit is a fool’s errand & UK farmers will soon be the first to learn that lesson. https://t.co/Ri8bev4wmi
Climate change, monopolistic practices & fair competition are neither right wing nor left wing. They’re mainstream and every farmer knows it. The problem is too few rely on science & law and too many rely on politics & gov’t subsidies. https://t.co/BHDE4KQ2Vc