Latest from Alan

Hocus pocus and–poof–taxpayers pay for more crop insurance

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 16, 2024

A longstanding complaint here is the utter incomprehensibility of federal milk pricing policy. For years we’ve joked (mostly through tears) that only four people in the world understand its complexity and, worse, not one of them is a dairy farmer.

As if to prove our point, […]

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‘Overalls, two shoes, and a belt’

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 9, 2024

The clothes we wore, like the crops we worked, marked the seasons on the dairy farm of my youth. Coveralls, for example, suggested winter while (ahem) “cover little” meant the hot, steamy southern Illinois summer.

That was especially so for my brothers and me. If we were relegated to kitchen […]

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Words matter… until they don’t 

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 2, 2024

We in agriculture have a long tradition of marketing our bounty by more pleasant, if not less-than-truthful, names in hopes that less-informed eaters buy the sizzle rather than the fact.

For example, the beef checkoff has spent millions urging people to purchase something called flat-iron steak that isn’t steak […]

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Let’s clear up this confusing trade talk once and for all

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 26, 2024

The Biden Administration’s trade agenda–mostly forgotten after three years of Covid, inflation, war in Ukraine, brutality in the Middle East, and a cantankerous Congress–recently surfaced and, wow, is it a mess.

For example, both presumptive presidential candidates, Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump, recently argued over how high […]

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Here comes the 2024 Farm Bill, there goes any 2024 reforms

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 19, 2024

The slowest dance on Capitol Hill, the writing of a new Farm Bill, gained tempo May 1 when both the House and Senate Ag committees released versions of their bills.

The House bill was a broadly worded, five-page “outline;” the Senate’s, a detailed 94-page report. Noting the differences in both heft […]

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