Patterns: Welcome back, foodie
We didn’t know it back then but everyone on the big southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth was a foodie.
Real ag agenda seems to be football and pheasants
In Congress, the House aggies aren't exactly tied up with policy debates to address, say, today's soaring food prices, the nation's perilously thin food stocks or a dysfunctional federal dairy policy.
School’s in session across Potomac
If you think schoolchildren dread summer school, consider the eight-week summer session agriculture's friends in Congress face.
Congress change means policy change
Leaving a backlog of work it clearly had no appetite for, a deeply divided, very worried Congress skedaddled out of Washington at the end of September to make its re-election case to an equally divided, equally worried electorate.
Silencing the circus we call television
A month or so ago, the manager of this one-dog farmette clipped the coaxial cable that linked our rural home to the yellers at...
The facts, numbers jumble: Go figure
Columnist Alan Guebert speculatees on the mystery of how identical facts and figures often lead people to draw different conclusions.
USDA’s mad cow circus: Act II
After spending the last four years marrying the U.S. cattle market to Canada's cattle market - the new family's name is "the integrated North American beef market" - the USDA is now saddled with its handiwork.
Government playing the patsy again
If either you or I get in a high-stakes poker game and we lose our shirts, an absolute certain bet is that the government will not bail us out.
Confirmation Sunday: Starting down the path to heaven in front of a forsythia bush
We may have thought Confirmation Sunday as parole day from catechism purgatory but (as our gray-haired elders predicted back then) it would become the first step on a journey of deeper understanding and deeper commitment.
He is farm policy’s pain in the neck
If you're a conventional farm policy person - as most farm leaders and members of Congress are - Daryll Ray is becoming your biggest pain in the neck.
