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.
Monsanto looks to lock up cotton market
In a move somewhere between brilliantly audacious and unbelievably outrageous, Monsanto's Aug. 15 offer to buy Delta & Pine Land Co.
Hong Kong WTO talks meaningless
If the dullest knife causes the deepest wounds, the Bush administration should stock up on gauze and duct tape as it takes its traveling trade show to Hong Kong's World Trade Organization Ministerial Dec.
Go slow on the bull market
You wouldn’t order a new pick-up truck without reserving the right to amend—choose—how the truck is equipped inside and out.
The same goes for a...
Free trade deals not about economics
Given today’s global economy, poisonous politics and trans-national interests, however, many of Big Ag’s biggest trade backers don’t see as simple or divine.
Budget’s math, politics don’t add up
Presidential budget proposals usually are about two things, politics and mathematics. Both elements carry equal weight.
Katrina’s agricultural effects are secondary to summer drought’s
As Hurricane Katrina's smashing blows fell on the Gulf Coast, commodity traders did what they always do when uncertainty hits the pits: They sold.
The great acreage race of 2007 is on
As the roaring combine sawed through 30 feet of soybeans at a fast-walk pace last October, a farming friend, through the convenience of his cell phone, sold 160 acres of still-standing corn for a couple or three nickels over $3 per bushel upon harvest.
Bring on the winter season
Fall’s first frost — usually a mid-October event in my adopted central Illinois — waited until the last possible monthly moment — deep into Halloween night — to finally show winter’s white face.
North Korean trade deal is ‘lunacy’
Be it mere coincidence or clear symbolism, the delightfully early and deliciously warm spring enjoyed by farmers and ranchers came to a stone-cold halt just days after the U.
