Can’t duck crop insurance disaster
Many on Capitol Hill are quick to point out that “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck.”...
Readers know how to write, too
On an early morning bicycle ride I roll past a massive red combine slumbering at the end of a freshly barbered wheat field.<
‘Free markets’ really aren’t free
If there’s no such thing as a free lunch — and there isn’t: even the United States Department of Agriculture’s “free” National School Lunch...
A golden goose for chicken feed
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...
Bigger programs, bigger boondoggles
In mid-June, the best guessers on Capitol Hill handicapped a probable 2012 Farm bill this way: either the Senate passes its version by the...
Some hot numbers in cold times
As the world stumbles toward a summer of financial winter, one part of the American economy continues its merry, five-year waltz: U.S. ag exports...
Go ahead and bet against Europe
When I hopped on the ag journalism jet in 1981, the European Union (known then as the European Economic Union) forecast it would spend...
Take a guess how this is going to end
Since you speak English as well as anyone, perhaps you understand the working paragraph of a May 19 Washington Post column that explains the...
Big numbers should trigger hard questions
Hard numbers, hard questions and even harder answers.
The wisdom of hard work on the farm: ‘It won’t kill you’
It is the universal German Lutheran explanation for all the unnecessary sweat generated by farm folks since the Garden of Eden, "Besides, it doesn't kill us."
