Farm & Food File

When you set a record ag trade deficit for the third consecutive year, the decline isn’t an aberration or a coincidence. It is growing proof that your national ag policy is headed in the wrong direction.

Few states put on a show like the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin, where 50,000 visitors from nearly 100 countries will see 1,800 owners exhibiting 2,500 or so of the best dairy cattle in the galaxy.

In our increasingly urgent quest to clean up our climate-altering, carbon-fueled culture, biodiesel and renewable diesel have become two new darlings of alternative fuel advocates.

Rain makes grain, and two mid-August Department of Agriculture reports offered this year’s first in-the-field look at just how much corn, soybeans and wheat American farmers will grow this wet, grain-making year.

Milton Friedman, the patron saint of free markets and a founder of the Nobel-adorned Chicago school of economics, took a very dim view of all tariffs — ours, theirs, anyone’s.

Trying to stem the flow of money in politics is like trying to hold back the Mississippi River. It’s dirty, dangerous work that is almost always washed away by a flood of even more money.

Nearly 45% of all agricultural workers in the United States today — 950,000 of an estimated 2.2 million farmworkers — are “unauthorized” migrants working illegally on American farms and ranches.

Like most southern Illinois farms of my youth, my family had a closet filled with guns.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn the Chevron deference was a business-favoring decision to upend 40 years of legal precedent and redirect federal power from agencies like the USDA to the courts and Congress.

This year, like last year, is a farm bill year — and this year, like last year, probably won’t deliver a farm bill. The reason is the oldest one in Washington, D.C.: politics.

As an end-of-the-road farm boy growing up deep in southern Illinois, the Fourth of July was more of a shade-tree holiday from the alfalfa field than a noisy celebration of national independence.

While Americans still face a long season of political campaigning, more than 80 other nations have completed their federal elections this year or are about to go to the polls.

A longstanding complaint here is the utter incomprehensibility of federal milk pricing policy. For years we’ve joked that only four people in the world understand its complexity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Early in my first year at the Big U, a new friend from Chicago’s South Side asked me what he thought was an innocent question.

Long before it became a cliché, there were many heroes who never wore capes. I met one: the rail-thin, then-86-year-old Theodore W. Schultz, in his sun-filled, University of Chicago office on a cold, January day in 1989.

Federal policymakers have a problem: Their hope to make corn and soybeans the feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel hit a wall when the aviation industry ruled biofuel from either crop did not meet its “sustainable” guidelines.

The easiest way to win any game is to rig the rules. That’s what Big Ag and its loyal boosters at the U.S. Department of Agriculture appear to be doing to make sure their new project, sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, flies.

When word came out of Texas on April 1 that avian flu had made another unwelcome hop — this one from a dairy cow to a human — the news seemed like an April Fool’s joke. It wasn’t.

Even when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finds enough baling wire to lash together the votes to pass the budget, it’s little more than a signal to some of his colleagues to heat up the tar and gather the feathers.

The first economist, Scotland’s Adam Smith, had it right almost 250 years ago, as writer Eric Schlosser notes in the foreword of an important new book by Iowan Austin Frerick.

On March 2, the 13th World Trade Organization ministerial ended like most previous ministerials. After its 164 member-ministers discussed the burning need to change two, key international trade rules, everyone went home without changing any key international trade rules.

If an important part of your business is flying between the United States and New Zealand — like it is for Air New Zealand — you get pretty skilled at making the tedious, 13-hour flight go smoothly.

Like much of the news anymore, the initial numbers from the Census of Agriculture were accurately reported, quickly downplayed — or even worse, ignored — by most Big Ag groups and then just pushed aside.

While my father milked cows and farmed for almost 50 years, I never heard him say he loved — or, for that matter, even liked — either cows or farming.

Recently, a retired friend asked if I planned to retire anytime soon. It was the right question. While I have considered retirement, I explained, I have no real plans — soon or otherwise — to do so.

For at least the past decade, “a growing number of peer-reviewed medical studies have linked exposure to nitrates in drinking water to elevated incidences of cancer.” As the environmental news service clearly states, this news isn’t exactly news.

There’s a joke about my fellow Baby Boomers making the rounds that goes something like this: In the 1960s, Boomers didn’t trust anyone over 30, but as soon as they reached their 60s, they didn’t trust anyone under 30.

While January left the old year behind, it didn’t leave behind any of the baggage 2023 saddled American farmers and ranchers with.

Like some character in Alice in Wonderland, we’re well beyond the looking glass when the presumptive presidential candidate of the political party that prides itself as being fiscally conservative asks farmers, “Look, did I get you $28 billion…?”

The pain I felt late Sunday, Jan. 7, was hard to pinpoint until I realized exactly when it struck: just moments after news of a tentative, 2024 budget deal between Senate and House negotiators had been announced.

At the height of the Christmas giving season, the governors of Iowa and Nebraska, two largely rural, heavily agricultural states, chose to play Grinch by turning down tens of millions of federal food assistance dollars.

Founding father Benjamin Franklin was spot-on almost three centuries ago when he noted — in print, no less — that two unavoidable facts of life were death and taxes.

Its official name is the “United Nations 28th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change,” or COP28 for short. Given the news from the two-week gathering in the desert near Dubai, however, a better name might be “Shifting Sands, Shifting Blame.”

Time seems to take longer in Washington, D.C. Case in point: If you were a Republican on Capitol Hill, 2023 was endless.

The Christmas tree was a scrub cedar hacked from the edge of the woods that bordered the farm. Big-bulbed lights, strung in barber pole fashion, generated almost as much heat as the nearby woodstove.

After a five-year run that featured a costly trade war and an even costlier, deadly pandemic, the biggest players in the global soybean market are positioning themselves for a big, bruising 2023-2024 marketing year.

The old maxim, “the more things change, the more things stay the same,” might ring true for some facets of our lives, but it’s not true for climate change.

Demeter is a common name in the grain trade. For example, Indiana-centered Demeter LP was a family-owned, regional grain business for more than 50 years.

“Mathematics,” once explained Edward Frenkel, a renowned mathematician and author, “directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its shapes and curves, (and) holds the reins of everything from tiny atoms to the biggest stars.”

As difficult as it was for House Republicans to find an electable leader, that rough start was the easy part. Ahead lies governing and it promises to be tricky.

The slightly fuzzy, somewhat overexposed photograph captures a carefree moment in my 3-year-old brother Christian’s childhood. He’s wearing just a pair of shorts and a bewildered grin.

The Speaker will have less than a month to push through a workable federal budget and — at the very least — extend the now-expired 2018 farm bill through the end of the year, if not through all of 2024.

The cattle market’s future, like the West’s wild and rowdy past, will feature sweat, brawls and blood.

One of the last giants of the 1960s and ‘70s Green Revolution, M.S. Swaminathan, died at his home in Chennai, India, on Sept. 28. He was 98.

Beyond Meat Inc., founded in 2009, has had almost 15 years to build a product lineup that is — as its name claims — beyond meat and, by some business metrics, it has.

Evidence continues to pile up that today’s political and grain market pileups will be bigger and messier than first thought. Right now, it’s political carnage that’s making headlines.