What is the grain market telling us?
As corn and soybeans cash prices flutter around their post-harvest highs, a farmer telephones with a question: How do February's stronger prices compare to...
Snowy winter days sure have changed
A dash of sugar-like snow is almost lost in the brown grass and gray sky out my back door. Winter's dullness seems to have...
MF Global was not running on vapor
The lead story on the front page of the Jan. 30 Wall Street Journal reported "that a 'significant amount'" of an estimated $1.2 billion in customer money that disappeared when investment bank MF Global Holdings Ltd. collapsed "could have 'vaporized' as a result of chaotic trading ... the week before the company's Oct. 31 bankruptcy filing."
Crude oil and crude politics
Like the weather, everyone complains about how slanderous politics has become but no one ever does anything about it.
Do the math: Oil ($$) trumps food
In south Texas, 407 million gallons of water will yield either $200,000 of corn or $2.5 billion of oil and gas. That means there are 12,500 times more reasons to use the water to extract oil and gas than to grow corn and cows.
The good old farmboy network
Most folks are familiar with the Good old boy network, a loose collection of family and friends that can be tapped for personal or business needs. Few, however, know that agriculture has it own network, the good old farmboy network.
Iowa State may want shy from African lands
It’s hard to see Iowa State University’s key role in a plan by one of its top officials to develop an 800,000-acre farm in...
Auld Lang sighs as 2012 begins
Before this 2012 thing gets too far down the road, let's take a sober second or two to review some of the more inventive ideas from 2011 and see if we can't make them work in the coming 12 months of political and economic stalemate.
Farm and Food File: Readers respond in year-end column
As we slip into the sweet week between Christmas and New Year's there's only one task to complete before clearing the desk and brain of all things 2011: readers having the last word in the last column of the year.
Farm and Food File: Christmas joy in the gymnasium
A month ago I enjoyed a church dinner in the gymnasium of the grade school I attended 50 years ago. Back then, the gym sparkled with newness because, like the school itself, it was brand new, finished just weeks before I reported to the first grade as an equally new student.
