The only thing hotter than the August nights on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth were the August days, and the only thing hotter than the August days were the August Sunday mornings spent wilting in the heat and humidity that St. John’s Lutheran Church held so well.
Pastor Gross’ stern stare and even […]
As a trained professional in most things English (the language, not the nation), and with the Labor Day kick-off to the election season just around the corner, permit me a three-minute tutorial on “English for the English Speaker.”
We’ll begin by acknowledging the obvious: English, like Yorkshire pudding, isn’t always what it appears. More importantly, […]
In late March, Monsanto Co. sent a “Dear Valued Customer” letter to most U.S. corn and soybean farmers.
The reason, wrote Jim Zimmer, Monsanto’s vice president of U.S. branded business, was “to discuss… some current marketplace dynamics that will directly affect you in terms of increased prices for Monsanto’s line of Roundup herbicides for 2008.” […]
The news from Geneva July 29 that the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round of global trade talks had “collapsed” hardly came as news to anyone other than WTO leader Pascal Lamy and U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab.
Both had assumed their negotiating strategy — a concession by Europe here, the slow sell-out of U.S. farmers there […]
The American economy is downright Dickensian. If you’re in investment banking, airlines, real estate or automobile anything, it’s the worst of times. If you’re in commodities — oil, copper, potash, gold, corn, soybeans — it’s the best of times.
When Farm Journal’s late staff economist John Marten explained the-then new Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the mid-1980s, he did so with a clever memory tool.
“CRP isn’t complicated,” Marten once told a large crowd (which included me) back then, “if you remember the ‘Four Ws’: West, Wheat, Wet and Windy.”
CRP will be called many […]
Can anyone explain why the biggest haters of the “nanny state” are also the biggest supporters of the biggest nanny the world has ever created?
If JBS Swift’s buyout of National Beef, Smithfield’s beef slaughter operations and Smithfield’s massive Five Rivers Cattle Feeding LLC, the nation’s largest cattle feedlot with one-time capacity of 811,000 head, the three remaining firms will have over 80 percent market share of U.S. steer/heifer slaughter.
With the summer’s big holiday just ahead and the midpoint of the year just behind, it’s time to empty the office bucket of spleen, venom, anger and an occasional kiss readers vented, hurled, sent and tossed my way.
First, some corrections. “As a farmer and a Spanish teacher, I felt compelled to correct the spelling of […]
While Midwestern farmers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have precise measurements on how much rain fell where in the deluge that socked 2008 planting, it will be months before anyone anywhere will know the final damage to property, production and prices.
Early guesses — a few official, many unofficial — however, are floating in. Before […]