During a long-ago interview, the great grandson of a Kansas homesteader noted that only a handful of the 40 or so families who staked out farms with his family a century before remained after three years of disease, drought and death.

Maybe the unseasonably hot temperatures that blistered the Midwest most of September can be traced to global warming, solar flares or the high volume of hot air blowing westward from Washington.

(NOTE: Below is the second of a two columns on a now-collapsing, multimillion-dollar farmer-owned cooperative.

NOTE: Below is the first of a two columns on a now-collapsing, multimillion-dollar farmer-owned cooperative.

In response to a tidal wave of tainted imported food and consumer goods hitting America this summer, President George W.

In one episode of the 1970s television series M*A*S*H, an eminently paranoid Army intelligence officer tags flag-waving Frank Burns a Communist sympathizer because Burns subscribes to flag-waving Reader’s Digest.

In the summer’s waning warmth after Labor Day, my mother would order her child army into the big garden of my youth to gather the year’s final flush of vegetables.

In the down-is-up world of American biofuels, success carries enormous costs. The latest evidence of these costs is an amendment tucked into the House version of the 2007 farm bill: As Mexican granular sugar flows into the U.

Some of the sagest advice my father ever offered my brothers and me urged us not to “hit back at bullies” because, sooner or later, “They’ll get theirs.

Every August, about silage chopping time, my mind flits back to a burning question of my youth: Given the old fashioned way we made corn silage on that southern Illinois dairy farm, were we just poor or were we just cheap?