Farm and Food File

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.

Even by its Olympic standards for hyperbole and hypocrisy, the performance of the U.S. Senate during the fruitless, pre-Thanksgiving farm bill debate was breathtaking.

What will Wal-Mart's new organic sales mean for farmers?

No July passes without baseball’s All-Star game and no All-Star game passes without most middle-aged farmboys recalling childhood dreams of playing professional baseball.

The USDA would like some staff members to refer to "climate change" as "weather extremes" and "climate change adaption" as "resilience to weather extremes."

Alan Guebert and his family enjoyed the perfect gateway to Scandinavia. In his column this week, he shares some of the most breathtaking sites of his trip.

Given the sad state of affairs in today's affairs of state - record federal budget deficits, record trade deficits, illegal domestic eavesdropping, the sale of key U.

In the run-up to the Nov. 7 election, any candidate worth a baby-kissing pucker instantly, enthusiastically and repeatedly took the ethanol pledge.

Every week for 19 years this 170 square-foot, two-dog, one-person office has declared its complete devotion to numbers. For example, just last week we...

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there now are federal commodity checkoffs for beef, blueberries, Christmas trees, cotton, dairy products, eggs, fluid milk, Hass avocados, “Honey Packers and Importers,” lamb, mango, mushrooms, paper and paper-based packaging, peanuts, popcorn, pork, potatoes, processed raspberries, softwood lumber, sorghum, soybeans and watermelons.