In the big, slow move this past summer from the big, painted house in town, my worn copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac went missing.

If you’re a conventional farm policy person – as most farm leaders and members of Congress are – Daryll Ray is becoming your biggest pain in the neck.

If a few American dairy processors have their way with the agbiz-pliant U.S. Department of Agriculture, American consumers will be buying milk, cheese and other dairy products altered with items not approved as food ingredients by the Food and Drug Administration.

After a few tough months at home – falling poll numbers, staying at Rancho del Lazio while New Orleans flooded, Harriet “Who?” Miers – the Bush Administration sought to get its mojo working again by dropping an agricultural trade bomb in Geneva Oct.

When word leaked Sept. 15 that the USDA planned to close more than 700 of it 2,353 Farm Service Agency offices around the country, reaction among Capitol Hill aggies was swift and mostly unkind.

Since early spring, Republican aggies in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate have warned their farm and ranch constituents that farm program spending will be cut $3 billion over five years, beginning with the 2006 federal budget.

Of all the lessons beaten into America by crashing Katrina, one of the biggest is that the nation’s energy policy, past as well as present, is an absolute scandal.

More than most months, September delivers farmers key numbers – yield per acre, weaning weight, price per pound or bushel – they will live with for the coming months.

As Hurricane Katrina’s smashing blows fell on the Gulf Coast, commodity traders did what they always do when uncertainty hits the pits: They sold.

The end of central Illinois’ heat-stoked, rain-starved summer is being whispered in the yellow leaves rattling on my backyard’s black walnut trees.