Farm and Food File

Suggestions on how to change the 2012 farm bill are popping up faster than jack-o'-lanterns. Like this gap-toothed hallmark of Halloween, however, most are hollow, scary and shed little light.

When Chairman Frank Lucas gaveled the full House Ag Committee to order Oct. 12, aggies who depend on commodity futures markets to price their crops, livestock and dreams might have thought the hearing would center on what its title suggested: "To Review Legislative Proposals Amending Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act." The hearing would do no such thing.

Today’s politics are dominated by the inside-out logic that doing nothing is better than doing anything. We even pay dozens in Congress at least $174,000 per year to ensure it

The usual six-mile drive home from Sunday church took a pleasant turn some weeks ago. As I headed back to the farmette for more...

Already deeply engaged in a bloody war, a young, untested president-- whose thin resume noted but a handful of undistinguished terms in the Illinois...

So corn is rockin' north of $7, beans are toyin' with $14, cattle look to be headed to who-knows-where and hogs, well, bacon is sellin' for what steak used to.

A day does not pass without some Big Ag chieftain or Capitol Hill yakker parting their perpetually pursed lips to unleash total nonsense on...

The official name for the group of 12 U.S. House and Senate members charged with finding "at least" $1.5 trillion in cuts to the...

Bloggers might do coincidence; journalists don't. We do irony, maybe even allegory. Sometimes we stray into ennui and pathos. Coincidence, however, features facts that aren't tied as tightly together as we like. My Oxford Desk Dictionary agrees.

The undercooked thought and overbaked talk that endlessly paralyzes Washington would not have gone far on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth before someone, boss or hired hand alike, would have condemned the yak and urged all to "get to work."