Farm & Food File

It’s been years since this weekly effort has used any time, muscle or brain cells to write or, frankly, even care about any of the 21 costly, largely ineffective and virtually bulletproof federal commodity checkoff programs.

At the height of the mid-August heat wave, I was relieved when an old friend canceled his planned trip to attend a sprawling, old farm machinery show amid central Illinois’ endless, sweltering cornfields.

Even before Congress returned from its five-week, no-work period, Republicans signaled their return will bring no 2023 farm bill and no 2024 federal budget by the two laws’ drop-dead date, Sept. 30.

There was a time when the USDA's August Crop Production report was more feared by American farmers than any paste-colored Soviet leader with a shaky finger near the nuclear launch button.

When asked to describe war, Union General William T. Sherman noted that “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Later, Sherman did refine his dictum to the much shorter, impossible-to-forget: “War is hell.”

To ancient Greeks and Romans, the “dog days of summer” began when Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major — Latin for “big dog” — “appears to rise alongside the sun.”

The one certainty about the Ukrainian-Russian war is that there is little certainty. Even with Russia’s recent history of aggression, few predicted outright war.

The first names were common in the last century: Clara, Woodrow, Elmer, Ethel. The last names, Anglicized over time, mostly reached back to Germany and France with a few stopping short in Ireland and Scotland.

Long before presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars and the Capitol Hill press corps obsessed daily over who’s up and who’s down, Congress worked together to resolve controversial national issues.

After plowing through a new USDA report titled “Concentration and Competition in U.S. Agribusiness,” I asked an agronomist friend why it seemed that its writers used so much “hem-and-haw” language.

In the bitterly divided, highly partisan world of Washington, D.C., few institutions are more divided and more partisan than today’s Supreme Court.

When Congress returns to Capitol Hill after its Fourth of July district “work” period — 17 days long for the House and 16 days for the Senate — members face two enormous tasks with little time to complete either.

Everywhere you look on the sun-drenched Stockholm streets, you see blue and yellow. Blue sky, blue water and the powder blue field of the Swedish flag dominate in all directions.

This marks an anniversary for this reporting effort: 30 years ago the first Farm and Food File appeared in three central Illinois newspapers.

So, what do bacon, blueberries and Capitol Hill’s fast-spinning revolving door have in common?