If mega-biz is to be believed, the new antitrust chief in the Obama Department of Justice, Christine A. Varney, is really a hurricane whose chief ambition is to demolish the very foundations of modern American business.
If the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, Varney’s first public comments on antitrust, offered in May 12 […]
In the long, expensive battle fought by U.S. farmers to make corn-based ethanol the premier alternative fuel in America, few Washington influence peddlers fought harder and spent more in opposition to it than the American Petroleum Institute.
In fact, you name the biofuel issue and API and its fat checkbook made it into a bare-knuckle […]
Who is J. Dudley Butler and why are meatpackers and their allies saying nasty things about the courtly, 61-year-old from Yazoo County, Miss.?
The short answer is that Butler is the new administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA). That makes him the watchdog over Big Meat and their […]
A morning thunderstorm ripped through my rural farmette recently and in its wake I found a front yard peppered with green walnuts, a sky bluer than the Pacific and memories as warm as the August afternoon that threatened.
On the big dairy farm of my youth, everyone — my two older brothers and I, my father, […]
One of the basic rules of my incredibly successful one-dog, two-ink pen operation is that if the government wants to give some of my tax money back, I take it.
Depreciation? Thank you. Double declining balance, three-backflips depreciation? Thank you very much.
That simple principle, however, was trampled July 22 when a Senate Ag Committee hearing took […]
With the summer already two-thirds over and the dog days of August about to seep in, I’ll bet you didn’t notice that…
About the time troubled New York lender CIT Group started coughing up blood two weeks ago, a trustee for one of its former clients, Meadowbrook Farms Cooperative, was alerting a federal bankruptcy judge […]
Maybe this is what Willie and Waylon were thinking when they warned American “mommas” to not let their “babies to grow up to be cowboys:” Anyone with a dairy cow this year will lose, on average, $70 per month feeding and milking it; more if the cow is also packin’ debt.
Losing big
That means, in […]
In the five months and three weeks since readers last took over this space, my snail mail and e-mail has taken on a decidedly red hot-ice cold nature.
Those who enjoy the column smother me in roses. Those who can’t stand my views — and, often, the fact that I exist — cannot believe someone […]
Once, during a friendly debate over global warming, I asked a well-informed acquaintance what the consequences were if he was wrong in his insistence that global warming was simply Al Gore’s revenge for the 2000 presidential election.
“Well,” he replied after a long pause to, I guess, stare 40 years into the future, “if I’m […]
All truth passes through three stages, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once explained. “First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
That line came to mind June 18 when I heard a nationally known ag radio reader report that, the day before, the National Farmers Union had publicly […]
