‘Tis the warm-wish sending season; the once-a-year time when family, friends and former neighbors post colorful cards and newsy letters to the lovely Catherine and me detailing their lives since last Christmas.

Of the many memories I have of Christmas on the farm, I don’t have a single memory of ever telling Santa what I wanted for Christmas.

Before the cheerless rush to abandon Washington, D.C. hits, here are a few suggestions for our hired hands in Congress on what they should not give farmers, ranchers and the rest of us in rural America this holiday season.

American humorist Will Rogers once cracked that Americans are the only people in the world to drive themselves to the poor house.

Even by its Olympic standards for hyperbole and hypocrisy, the performance of the U.S. Senate during the fruitless, pre-Thanksgiving farm bill debate was breathtaking.

Despite Thanksgiving’s late November arrival, neither we nor the neighbors of the southern Illinois farm of my youth were done with harvest by the harvest holiday.

In the science of agronomy, no more sacred ground exists than that of the Morrow Plots, a hemmed-in acre in the middle of the University of Illinois campus that, since 1876, has been under continuous corn production.

If you tuned into the webcast debate of the Senate Ag Committee approving its long overdue 2007 farm bill Oct.

Before a months-long summer slips into a months-long winter, it’s time to use this week or two interlude - formerly called fall - to sweep my office.

As sure as the rooster crows every morning, someone will crow every farm bill year on how New Zealand’s 1984 elimination of government farm programs has brought a never-ending dawn to Kiwi farmers.