Farm & Food File

If you are one of the millions of Americans who pollsters say “voted for change” last November, boy, are you getting it now.

Longtime readers of this weekly effort may recall my affection for the word “woodenheadedness.” It comes from “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman’s 1984 book.

The Trump administration may grant U.S. agriculture special exemptions from parts of its ever-changing tariff regime, but it can’t exempt it from everyday economic reality.

The rural version of the Golden Rule is this: Do unto your neighbors’ farms that you’d have your neighbors to do unto yours.

Medicaid looks to be one of the big corks Congress hopes will help plug an estimated $4.7 trillion flood of red ink that accompanies tax cuts Republicans plan to pass this spring.

In the seven weeks that global markets and U.S. farmers have been living in the uncertain trade world of the Trump administration, prices for most American ag exports have headed south faster than a Canada goose in late October.

If it’s Tuesday, the White House’s long-promised tariffs against Canada and Mexico are on again, but if it’s Thursday, they — well, many that its Big Biz backers don’t want — are off again. No, wait.

You can kill houseflies with a shotgun, but that’s best done outdoors and away from people. Of course, drawing a bead on the indoor pests outdoors defeats the purpose of going after the little buggers in the first place.

One of the first marketing lessons offered to me, a wet-behind-the-ears ag editor, by a steely and successful ag futures trader was as simple and useful as a feed bucket.

Folk singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie is undergoing a welcomed revival with the success of the new Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown.”

During the final stages of building the world’s first atomic bomb, scientists worried their new weapon might ignite the atmosphere and wipe out every living thing. Farmers are experiencing similar anxieties as efforts slash federal spending.

When you push markets one way with tariffs, you should expect an equal and opposite reaction from those same markets.

Just weeks into the Republican takeover of Congress and the White House, Project 2025 is the cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s governing plans.

My father began retiring long before the sale of our farm’s dairy cows in 1989. Began is the appropriate word because his exit from dairy farming was “slower than molasses in January,” as he liked to say. Years slow, in fact.

The day after Congress certified Donald Trump’s election as president, the U.S. Border Patrol conducted unannounced raids throughout Bakersfield, California, descending on businesses where day laborers and field workers gather. The impact was immediate.

A report on sustainable aviation fuel issued by Canada’s National Farmers Union makes a CO2-tight case that this largely crop-based, “renewable” alternative to today’s carbon-heavy jet fuel should never be produced.

By far the biggest lender to U.S. farmers, ranchers and rural businesses is the Farm Credit System whose four banks and 56 associations hold nearly 50% of all debt in rural America.

Why the results surprised anyone is itself a surprise. After the state of California began testing dairy herds for highly pathogenic avian influenza, known also as bird flu or H5N1, in August, it found the pathogen on 645 dairy farms.

Before 2024 slides into history, some noteworthy farm and food updates, please, to ensure these stories go with it.

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 wood stove.

While the president-elect continues to nominate prospective members of his incoming administration, the outgoing Congress faces a hectic sprint to complete a long list of unmet legislative duties before their pre-Christmas adjournment.

If you believe in striking while the iron is hot, you got to love Summit Carbon Solutions’ swift, decisive action on its multibillion-dollar, CO2 pipeline just weeks after Donald Trump was reelected.

Nearly every autopsy of Vice President Kamala Harris’s stinging White House defeat begins with some variation of the phrase, “Voters pointed to the rising price of food as their chief concern.”

Calls for $20 billion in “emergency” farm program payments won’t go away now that the proposal’s principal audience, voters, have done their duty.

Every preelection poll for the U.S. presidential race saw it as a too-close-to-call nail-biter. Not one predicted the sweeping victory posted by former, now President-elect Donald Trump.

Election Day, Nov. 5, will end the costliest, dirtiest American political campaign season in memory and it will likely also mark Opening Day for what could be the costliest, dirtiest post-election fight in American history.

Let’s pause to consider the-above headline. First, it’s a quote; I didn’t write it. That’s important because the third rail of today’s ag journalism — the deadly, high-voltage topic that can burn your career — is Donald Trump.

If you buy nearly two billion pounds of beef a year — an on-the-hoof equivalent of seven million cattle — you’d think you’d get the best deal ever from your suppliers. Think again, says McDonald’s.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission — that toy poodle of a government watchdog overseeing the world’s largest agricultural and financial futures contracts — is being courted by the cryptocurrency industry.

Like farmers and ranchers, veterinarians love to pour concrete. Many build customized facilities dedicated to their animal health mission: examination rooms, operating theaters, cattle chutes, holding pens, loading docks.

The building gloom in today’s ag commodity markets — wheat, barley, oats and cotton farmers all face increased production and decreased prices — has caught the attention of a long-distracted Congress.

It’s easy to see why Eligio “Kika” de la Garza was elected to 16 consecutive terms in the House of Representatives and served his final seven as chairman of the wide-sweeping and often unruly House Ag Committee.

As American grocery buyers await a verdict on Kroger’s two-year-old bid to buy Albertsons, the European Commission took just 35 days to give its blessing to the merger between two of the world’s largest grain merchandisers.

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.