Is checkoff money being used illegally?
Do you know where your thousands - and on a national scale, hundreds of millions - of federally-mandated, non-refundable checkoff dollars go? It's a question Bobby King, policy director of Minnesota's Land Stewardship Project, asked when he viewed advertisements that attacked "anti-livestock activist groups" in the state on Minneapolis' powerhouse WCCO television station earlier this year.
Big U.S. aid goes to big agribusiness
While American taxpayers await an accounting on the billions sent to the Gulf Coast to clean up Katrina's devastation, USDA already knows the tab for four emergency programs hastily designed "to further reduce stress on the grain transportation system" caused by the storm.
Who killed the trade talks at Doha?
Unlike Mark Twain's quip upon reading his obituary, my early July "RIP Doha" column was neither premature nor exaggerated.
The high cost of political help
July has been a tough month for farmers and ranchers in The Washington Post. On July 2 and again July 18, The Post published lengthy investigative pieces on the enormous cost, wanton waste, and built-in silliness of today's federal farm programs.
World Trade Organization locked in dispute between the big and the little
The biggest non-news news of the yet-young summer arrived July 1 when the Doha Development Round of World Trade Organization talks melted into a muddy puddle of recriminations as the trade yakkers in Geneva failed to even begin their "last ditch" effort to save the troubled talks.
Considering taxes, trade and biofuels
Outside of accuracy, honesty and tight prose, the rules established (way back in May 1993) for these 700-word weekly adventures were few.
Matter doesn’t always matter
A month ago, Fred Kirschenmann, distinguished fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, preached to the preachers of the Northern Plains Conference of the United Church of Christ in Bismarck.
Dairy self-help program self-delusional
Three years ago come July 1, 70 percent or so of American dairy farmers began taxing themselves to fund a program the industry dubbed Cooperatives Working Together, or CWT.
U.S. farm groups say ‘no more’ in WTO
When the Senate confirmed Susan C. Schwab as the Bush Administration's Trade Representative June 8 - the second trade rep in just 13 months - it did so by voice vote, an uncommon occurrence for the usually-on-the-record body.
Busting the great ag export myth
Former Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman couldn't stop for a cup of coffee in farm and ranch country without waxing romantically on how "1 in 4 acres of American farm production is exported.
