On the sunny, first Sunday of October, Willie Nelson, 76; Neil Young, 63; John Mellencamp, three days shy of 58, and Dave Matthews, 42, brought their Farm Aid road show, now 24, to west St. Louis.
Having interviewed the three Farm Aid founders at the inaugural 1985 concert in Champaign, Ill., (Matthews joined the effort […]
The distant hickory trees sport golden crowns and the neighbor’s white oak has begun to flash hints of scarlet when the wind rustles its leaves. The slow, colorful drift into winter has begun; the wheels of nature are turning.
The wheels of harvest, however, are not. September is gone but nearly every acre of still-green […]
The two, almost-funny moments in The Informant!, Hollywood’s comedic treatment of the deadly serious, 1995 price fixing scandal at Archer Daniels Midland, failed to amuse the 60 or so viewers sharing the theater with the lovely Catherine and me Sept. 20.
Both passed with nary an audible laugh, guffaw or snort. That’s funny because each […]
If pushed to guess, I suspect that few of the lengthy, laudatory obituaries published the week after his Sept. 12 death would have pleased Norman E. Borlaug, the Iowa farm boy turned hunger fighter.
Borlaug, after all, wasn’t into flowers or flowery words. He was a plain-spoken, dirt-on-the-shoes plant breeder whose semi-dwarf and rust-resistant wheat […]
As many Eastern Cornbelt farmers nervously estimate just how many frost-free days (weeks?) they’ll yet need to bin an almost certain to-be-late harvest, it’s time for me to sweep my bins — or at least this 150 foot-square office — of some numbers that have accumulated over the summer.
For example, agriculture has a huge […]
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 […]
