Farm and Food File

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In the process of transferring the Farm and Dairy archives to our new Web site, some articles were not completely uploaded. If you find an article that is incomplete, please contact us with the title and date of that article and we will fix it. Thank you for your patience.

Tinkering with CRP could be costly

Monday, July 21, 2008 by Alan Guebert

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 […]

Who wins in world trade deals?

Thursday, July 17, 2008 by Alan Guebert

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?

JBS beef buy is bad for everyone

Thursday, July 10, 2008 by Alan Guebert

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.

Dirty laundry is out in the open now

Thursday, July 3, 2008 by Alan Guebert

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 […]

Flooding fallout is anyone’s guess

Thursday, June 26, 2008 by Alan Guebert

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 […]

Bare cupboard needs a great crop

Thursday, June 12, 2008 by Alan Guebert

There’s no profit in arguing with government numbers, a veteran commodity trader once moaned to me.

“You might be right come two months,” he explained, “but the market might kill you in two weeks.”

That advice came to mind when plowing into the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s June 2 Crop Progress Report. Despite the wettest, coldest, slowest […]

DFA not celebrating much this June

Thursday, June 5, 2008 by Alan Guebert

Mega-dairy co-op, Dairy Farmers of America, is the focus of several investigations.

Anti-ethanol effort led by grocers

Thursday, May 29, 2008 by Alan Guebert

According to two documents posted on Sen. Charles Grassley’s, R-Iowa, congressional Web site, the “grassroots” anti-ethanol media blitz that’s hitched today’s climbing food prices to farmer-backed biofuels is as fake as astro-turf.

Indeed, Grassley explained to Senate colleagues during his May 15 endorsement of the new farm bill, “It turns out that a $300,000, six-month retainer […]

Soybean farmers: Living on a prayer

Thursday, May 15, 2008 by Alan Guebert

As the cold, wet planting season of 2008 slips into mid-May, corn and soybean farmers are grousing about weather delays, the likelihood of reduced yields and a summer of stress before they find out if the former clobbered the latter.

While I empathize with their dilemma — this is easily the most costly crop any farmer […]

‘Bloated’ farm bill on shaky ground

Thursday, May 8, 2008 by Alan Guebert

Since 1981, when I picked up my first pen, paper and paycheck as a journalist, six farm bills have come and gone. With them came and went some giant elements in U.S. farm policy; elements like the Farmer Owned Reserve, planting set-asides, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole and longtime House Ag Committee boss Kike de la […]