Farm & Food File

The Christmas tree was a scrub cedar hacked from the edge of the woods that bordered the farm. Big-bulbed lights, strung in barber pole fashion, generated almost as much heat as the nearby wood stove.

While the president-elect continues to nominate prospective members of his incoming administration, the outgoing Congress faces a hectic sprint to complete a long list of unmet legislative duties before their pre-Christmas adjournment.

If you believe in striking while the iron is hot, you got to love Summit Carbon Solutions’ swift, decisive action on its multibillion-dollar, CO2 pipeline just weeks after Donald Trump was reelected.

Nearly every autopsy of Vice President Kamala Harris’s stinging White House defeat begins with some variation of the phrase, “Voters pointed to the rising price of food as their chief concern.”

Calls for $20 billion in “emergency” farm program payments won’t go away now that the proposal’s principal audience, voters, have done their duty.

Every preelection poll for the U.S. presidential race saw it as a too-close-to-call nail-biter. Not one predicted the sweeping victory posted by former, now President-elect Donald Trump.

Election Day, Nov. 5, will end the costliest, dirtiest American political campaign season in memory and it will likely also mark Opening Day for what could be the costliest, dirtiest post-election fight in American history.

Let’s pause to consider the-above headline. First, it’s a quote; I didn’t write it. That’s important because the third rail of today’s ag journalism — the deadly, high-voltage topic that can burn your career — is Donald Trump.

If you buy nearly two billion pounds of beef a year — an on-the-hoof equivalent of seven million cattle — you’d think you’d get the best deal ever from your suppliers. Think again, says McDonald’s.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission — that toy poodle of a government watchdog overseeing the world’s largest agricultural and financial futures contracts — is being courted by the cryptocurrency industry.

Like farmers and ranchers, veterinarians love to pour concrete. Many build customized facilities dedicated to their animal health mission: examination rooms, operating theaters, cattle chutes, holding pens, loading docks.

The building gloom in today’s ag commodity markets — wheat, barley, oats and cotton farmers all face increased production and decreased prices — has caught the attention of a long-distracted Congress.

It’s easy to see why Eligio “Kika” de la Garza was elected to 16 consecutive terms in the House of Representatives and served his final seven as chairman of the wide-sweeping and often unruly House Ag Committee.

As American grocery buyers await a verdict on Kroger’s two-year-old bid to buy Albertsons, the European Commission took just 35 days to give its blessing to the merger between two of the world’s largest grain merchandisers.

When you set a record ag trade deficit for the third consecutive year, the decline isn’t an aberration or a coincidence. It is growing proof that your national ag policy is headed in the wrong direction.

Few states put on a show like the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin, where 50,000 visitors from nearly 100 countries will see 1,800 owners exhibiting 2,500 or so of the best dairy cattle in the galaxy.

In our increasingly urgent quest to clean up our climate-altering, carbon-fueled culture, biodiesel and renewable diesel have become two new darlings of alternative fuel advocates.

Rain makes grain, and two mid-August Department of Agriculture reports offered this year’s first in-the-field look at just how much corn, soybeans and wheat American farmers will grow this wet, grain-making year.

Milton Friedman, the patron saint of free markets and a founder of the Nobel-adorned Chicago school of economics, took a very dim view of all tariffs — ours, theirs, anyone’s.

Trying to stem the flow of money in politics is like trying to hold back the Mississippi River. It’s dirty, dangerous work that is almost always washed away by a flood of even more money.

Nearly 45% of all agricultural workers in the United States today — 950,000 of an estimated 2.2 million farmworkers — are “unauthorized” migrants working illegally on American farms and ranches.

Like most southern Illinois farms of my youth, my family had a closet filled with guns.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn the Chevron deference was a business-favoring decision to upend 40 years of legal precedent and redirect federal power from agencies like the USDA to the courts and Congress.

This year, like last year, is a farm bill year — and this year, like last year, probably won’t deliver a farm bill. The reason is the oldest one in Washington, D.C.: politics.

As an end-of-the-road farm boy growing up deep in southern Illinois, the Fourth of July was more of a shade-tree holiday from the alfalfa field than a noisy celebration of national independence.

While Americans still face a long season of political campaigning, more than 80 other nations have completed their federal elections this year or are about to go to the polls.

A longstanding complaint here is the utter incomprehensibility of federal milk pricing policy. For years we’ve joked that only four people in the world understand its complexity.

The clothes we wore, like the crops we worked, marked the seasons on the dairy farm of my youth. Coveralls, for example, suggested winter while, ahem, “cover little” meant the hot, steamy southern Illinois summer.

We in agriculture have a long tradition of marketing our bounty by more pleasant, if not less-than-truthful, names in hopes that less-informed eaters buy the sizzle rather than the fact.

The Biden administration’s trade agenda — mostly forgotten after three years of COVID, inflation, war in Ukraine, brutality in the Middle East and a cantankerous Congress — recently surfaced and, wow, is it a mess.

The slowest dance on Capitol Hill, the writing of a new farm bill, gained tempo May 1 when both the House and Senate Ag committees released versions of their bills.

Early in my first year at the Big U, a new friend from Chicago’s South Side asked me what he thought was an innocent question.

Long before it became a cliché, there were many heroes who never wore capes. I met one: the rail-thin, then-86-year-old Theodore W. Schultz, in his sun-filled, University of Chicago office on a cold, January day in 1989.

Federal policymakers have a problem: Their hope to make corn and soybeans the feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel hit a wall when the aviation industry ruled biofuel from either crop did not meet its “sustainable” guidelines.

The easiest way to win any game is to rig the rules. That’s what Big Ag and its loyal boosters at the U.S. Department of Agriculture appear to be doing to make sure their new project, sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, flies.

When word came out of Texas on April 1 that avian flu had made another unwelcome hop — this one from a dairy cow to a human — the news seemed like an April Fool’s joke. It wasn’t.

Even when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finds enough baling wire to lash together the votes to pass the budget, it’s little more than a signal to some of his colleagues to heat up the tar and gather the feathers.

The first economist, Scotland’s Adam Smith, had it right almost 250 years ago, as writer Eric Schlosser notes in the foreword of an important new book by Iowan Austin Frerick.

On March 2, the 13th World Trade Organization ministerial ended like most previous ministerials. After its 164 member-ministers discussed the burning need to change two, key international trade rules, everyone went home without changing any key international trade rules.

If an important part of your business is flying between the United States and New Zealand — like it is for Air New Zealand — you get pretty skilled at making the tedious, 13-hour flight go smoothly.

Like much of the news anymore, the initial numbers from the Census of Agriculture were accurately reported, quickly downplayed — or even worse, ignored — by most Big Ag groups and then just pushed aside.

While my father milked cows and farmed for almost 50 years, I never heard him say he loved — or, for that matter, even liked — either cows or farming.

Recently, a retired friend asked if I planned to retire anytime soon. It was the right question. While I have considered retirement, I explained, I have no real plans — soon or otherwise — to do so.

For at least the past decade, “a growing number of peer-reviewed medical studies have linked exposure to nitrates in drinking water to elevated incidences of cancer.” As the environmental news service clearly states, this news isn’t exactly news.

There’s a joke about my fellow Baby Boomers making the rounds that goes something like this: In the 1960s, Boomers didn’t trust anyone over 30, but as soon as they reached their 60s, they didn’t trust anyone under 30.

While January left the old year behind, it didn’t leave behind any of the baggage 2023 saddled American farmers and ranchers with.

Like some character in Alice in Wonderland, we’re well beyond the looking glass when the presumptive presidential candidate of the political party that prides itself as being fiscally conservative asks farmers, “Look, did I get you $28 billion…?”

The pain I felt late Sunday, Jan. 7, was hard to pinpoint until I realized exactly when it struck: just moments after news of a tentative, 2024 budget deal between Senate and House negotiators had been announced.

At the height of the Christmas giving season, the governors of Iowa and Nebraska, two largely rural, heavily agricultural states, chose to play Grinch by turning down tens of millions of federal food assistance dollars.

Founding father Benjamin Franklin was spot-on almost three centuries ago when he noted — in print, no less — that two unavoidable facts of life were death and taxes.