Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
U.S. History
The ‘True Cost of Food’
Posted on August 27, 2021
Like any chain, today’s ubiquitous “supply chains” are only as strong as their weakest links. Americans again learned this elemental lesson a year ago when the rapidly exploding Covid-19 pandemic swept the nation’s streets, sidewalks, and pantries clean of cars, people, and groceries.
Less evident are today’s still-broken links in the global food supply chain.
For example, […]
Threading Needles with Camels
Posted on August 27, 2021
Twenty-five years ago, when almost every American farm and ranch organization was denying the existence of climate change, William E. Rees and a colleague developed a method to measure how much “nature” was required to support a people or an economy. They called that measurement an “ecological footprint.”
That science–ecological economics, Rees’s career specialty at the […]
The Actual Costs of the ‘Industrial Mind’
Posted on August 13, 2021
In an essay in his new book, Hogs Are Up, Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute near Salina, KS, revisits a speech he gave in Coon Rapids, IA, in August 2009 to mark the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous visit to the Roswell Garst farm.
During that cornfield summit, suggests Jackson, Garst and Khrushchev chatted about […]
This Time, The Scoreboard Tells the Whole Story
Posted on August 4, 2021
In farming, the late Farm Journal economist John Marten liked to say, we keep score with acres.
Right or wrong, acres–and the wealth they represent–have always been a measure of personal and professional success. The converse is true, too; the lack or loss of acres usually implies failure of sorts.
That critical measure is at the center […]
Worker Wages are Not the Cause of Higher Food Prices
Posted on July 7, 2021
After my first year at the Big U, I returned to the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth for a summer of work. The first task, however, was to ask my father to double my hourly pay from 50-cents an hour, the amount I’d been paid through high school, to $1 per hour.
“Well,” Dad […]
China’s Buying Binge Continues… Until It Doesn’t
Posted on June 11, 2021
China is even hungrier, richer, and—to the delight of almost every American farmer—more impatient in today’s global food market than anyone thought possible even a decade ago.
In fact, according to the data crunchers at Agricultural Economic Insights (aei), China now imports “about 100 million acres worth of crop production, or roughly 25% of total […]
More Greenhouse Gas Comes from Rural Leaders Than Rural America
Posted on May 19, 2021
While everyone uses water, Americans use it up, noted Wallace Stegner, the preeminent writer of the West, in his 1992 book of essays Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.
That shrewd observation is even more accurate today.
In fact, even though we’ve dammed every river west of—and including—the Missouri, pumped most underground aquifers to […]
The Boys of My Summer Arrive Every April
Posted on May 5, 2021
I was very young—I had just turned eight—to begin a torrid love affair but the St. Louis Cardinals made it easy. It was 1963, Stan Musial’s last year in baseball, and the young team began the season hot and stayed hot through July.
So hot, in fact, that the starting infield for the National League’s […]
Global Meatpackers Filet U.S. Taxpayers Again and Again
Posted on April 29, 2021
Like many global meatpacking companies, JBS SA, the giant Brazilian meat and poultry packer with extensive operations in North and South America, Europe, and Australia, spent most of the last six months buying its way out of trouble with U.S. customers and the American government.
Even a cursory examination shows JBS spent $221.5 million in […]
Big Agbiz’s Big ‘Price Fixing’ Settlements Need Big Fix
Posted on April 21, 2021
In a now too-common story in U.S agriculture, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) last month agreed to pay farmers $45 million to settle what the March 13 Wall Street Journal described as “price-fixing allegations leveled at its peanut processing division.”
While $45 million is, indeed, peanuts to ADM—its estimated 2020 revenue will top $65 billion—this isn’t the first […]