U.S. History

The Boys of My Summer Arrive Every April

 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 […]

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Global Meatpackers Filet U.S. Taxpayers Again and Again

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 […]

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Big Agbiz’s Big ‘Price Fixing’ Settlements Need Big Fix

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 […]

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Figuring the Odds

If you’re a corn and soybean farmer or an ag commodity futures trader, one of the biggest make-or-break days of the year looms: On March 31, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will issue its Prospective Plantings report.

      The much-anticipated report is the world’s first look at USDA’s best estimates for the upcoming year’s planted acreage of […]

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‘Who do we blame for not farming the way we now know we should?’

The tree-lined streets of the University of Massachusetts (UMass) and hallowed hallways of Yale University are two places most farmers would not expect to find a hot debate over soil erosion.

      And, yet, late this winter, staff at both campuses attacked agriculture’s ongoing failure to protect farmland. Don’t worry, no ivory tower was toppled. The […]

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Local Growers and Rural Grocers Should be Allies

If you think growing food in rural America is a tough business, you should trying selling food—groceries—in rural America.

      Just how tough is it?

      The 2019/20 Minnesota Rural Grocery Survey Report that found 77 percent of the state’s rural grocery stores make “an average or lower than average net profit of 1.1% after taxes.”

      As […]

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Rural America Shouldn’t Be a Dump Site for Corporate America

There’s a clear lesson in the chemical and ethical cloud now shrouding AltEn, a 25-million-gallon per year ethanol plant just south of Mead, NE.

      In fact, there’s more than one lesson but the big one—how rural America is becoming a legal dumping ground for wastes created by corporate America—may be AltEn’s enduring legacy.

      The plant, […]

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Letting Go Now That We’re Gone

After Collin Peterson, the former chairman of the House Ag Committee, lost his Nov. 2020 reelection bid to Republican challenger Michelle Fischbach, the 15-term congressman packed 194 boxes with office material and Capitol Hill memories and returned to his native Minnesota.

      The memorabilia included stacks of paper, piles of walnut plaques, one well-used office desk, […]

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The Best Way to Start is to Start

Forty years ago, two editors at Successful Farming magazine, Gene Johnston and Dean Houghton, won most major ag journalism awards with a story titled “Who will kill the hogs?”

       The piece (not available online) tracked a new, potent shift just beginning to hit the 600,000 hog farmers in the U.S.: Local meatpackers were being squeezed for hogs […]

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You’re in Charge of USDA; Where Do You Start?

The impossibly improbable has occurred and you’re now secretary of agriculture. What you think or say about farm and rural policy matters as much—and, often, more—than what other political and farm “leaders” think or say.

      So what do you think about U.S. agriculture today?

      You’re entering office with major grain markets on a bull run. Indeed, corn, soybeans, and wheat prices […]

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