Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, July 21, 2024 Like most southern Illinois farms of my youth, my family had a closet filled with guns. It was just inside the living room and it held my father’s 12-gauge Marlin shotgun, his .22 caliber Remington pump rifle, brother Richard’s single-shot 20-gauge shotgun, brother David’s single-shot 410-shotgun, and my single-shot .22 [...]| Farm & Food File
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, July 14, 2024 The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 28 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 Department of Agriculture (USDA) to the courts and Congress. Big Ag loved the news. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association [...]| Farm & Food File
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, July 7, 2024 This year, like last year, is a Farm Bill year and this year, like last year, probably won’t deliver any Farm Bill. The reason is the oldest one in Washington, D.C.: politics. Most Congressional Republicans aren’t interested in passing any bipartisan farm and food assistance bill when they believe a delay might deliver a GOP-controlled House, [...]| Farm & Food File
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 30, 2024 As an end-of-the-road farm boy growing up deep in southern Illinois, the Fourth of July was more of a shadetree holiday from the alfalfa field than a noisy celebration of national independence. Besides, we were more partial to a local hero, Abraham Lincoln, than any frilly “Founding Father.” That leaning [...]| Farm & Food File
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 23, 2024 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. For example, France’s general elections will be held June 30, the United Kingdom’s on July [...]| Farm & Food File
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 16, 2024 A longstanding complaint here is the utter incomprehensibility of federal milk pricing policy. For years we’ve joked (mostly through tears) that only four people in the world understand its complexity and, worse, not one of them is a dairy farmer. As if to prove our point, [...]| Farm & Food File
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 9, 2024 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. That was especially so for my brothers and me. If we were relegated to kitchen [...]| Farm & Food File
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 2, 2024 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. For example, the beef checkoff has spent millions urging people to purchase something called flat-iron steak that isn’t steak [...]| Farm & Food File
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 26, 2024 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. For example, both presumptive presidential candidates, Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump, recently argued over how high [...]| Farm & Food File
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 19, 2024 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. The House bill was a broadly worded, five-page “outline;” the Senate’s, a detailed 94-page report. Noting the differences in both heft [...]| Farm & Food File