On the face of it, few things carry a more apt name than today’s “lame duck” Congress. Indeed, how lame is it that after two years of raw partisanship and paralyzing inactivity, we believe two legislative bodies that haven’t agreed on what day it is since 2010 will — what — reform taxes, pass a [...]
To hear Fred Stokes tell it, he got carried away “a mite” in a Kansas City news conference Aug. 10 with his explanation of a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Cattlemen’s Beef Board over the management of the beef checkoff. Noting that the Humane Society of the U.S. had done the [...]
For the first year in five, the lovely Catherine and I will not be driving a sack of sweet potatoes, a cooler with a thawing turkey buried under dozens of adult beverages and a jar of sauerkraut to Washington D.C. for Thanksgiving with The Heirs. Different plans Instead, we’ll be slicing a bird and playing [...]
Life seems to bounce from one hard lesson to the next. For example, no sooner than someone tells you “It’s not about the money,” you learn that, yes, it’s always about the money. Then, after years of working hard to acquire that money, you discover that, no, you can’t take it with you. Farming and [...]
Sometimes it takes a newspaper’s ink-stained thumb to right the scale of justice, and no newspaper has a bigger, inkier thumb than the New York Times. On Sunday, Oct. 28, the Times published a 2,900-word tribute to the greedy good-old-boyism that seems to have been the only business plan of America’s biggest dairy cooperative, Dairy [...]
It’s pretty hard to be taken seriously in any debate if, geographically, you are located on the “Left Coast,” have elected a person known nationally as “Governor Moonbeam” to statewide office five times and are home to an industry, movie-making, built on fantasy that’s centered in an area referred to as “LaLa Land.” Farm fight [...]
If it’s a bad idea to play with matches, it’s an even worse idea to play with a blowtorch in a fireworks factory. And yet that’s just what farmers and ranchers do every time they price their cattle, corn, cotton and other commodities in global markets dominated by “high frequency trading,” trading driven by computers [...]
In most public policy debates, everyone favors “science” until science begins to favor one side over the other. When that occurs, science, suddenly, isn’t so hallowed and name-calling soon takes over. Rare, however, is the instance when an apparent winner in a science face-off uses so much name-calling during a victory lap that the intended [...]
Somehow a notice went out a week ago to all the blue jays in Illinois that the acorns on (what I think is) a shingle oak outside my office were ripe for the picking. Within hours, a dozen or more jays appeared in the tree’s top branches to pluck, shuck and consume the soft fruit [...]
A long, bitter year in the long, bitter Congressional session drifted into the campaign season with the U.S. House of Representatives unable or unwilling to butter the softest piece of legislative toast before them, the 2012 Farm Bill. Speaker of the House John Boehner attempted to telegraph that likely outcome two months ago as Congress [...]
