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 […]
As the end of June edges into sight, my mind floats back to those hot, long days on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth when noon dinner brought everyone together for the day’s big meal.
Afterward, all the adults napped until precisely 1 p.m.
Uncle Honey, my father’s uncle who spent 20 of […]
Four days before the seventh and final “listening session” June 1 to gather producer comments on NAIS, the National Animal Identification System, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced USDA would host six additional meetings for the public “to voice their concerns about the current NAIS system and offer potential solutions.”
The extra meetings are […]
When I was drawing a paycheck as a cocksure marketing advisor and newsletter writer nearly 30 years ago, my colleagues and I often explained our hedging mistakes by simply declaring our advice had been “ahead of the market.”
We were right, the line of malarkey went, but the slicksters in the futures markets were too […]
When the international trade portion of your resume is as thin as Ron Kirk’s — you do remember that Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, is now U.S. Trade Representative, don’t you? — it’s likely you’d stress personal ideals over professional accomplishments when talking about your new job.
Kirk did just that in a May […]
If you want to see just how badly broken America’s health care system is come to the country.
Be careful during your visit, however, because rural America — where just nine percent of the nation’s doctors serve 17 percent of its citizens scattered across 80 percent of its geography — is not an ideal place […]
