Don’t know much ’bout economics
In the transition from farm boy to student to journalist, I skated and stumbled through several academic departments at the Big U. For example,...
The truth about rock-and-roll
On the sunny, first Sunday of October, Willie Nelson, 76; Neil Young, 63; John Mellencamp, three days shy of 58, and Dave Matthews, 42,...
We knew cold on our southern Ill. farm
The distant hickory trees sport golden crowns and the neighbor's white oak has begun to flash hints of scarlet when the wind rustles its...
The film The Informant is not funny
The two, almost-funny moments in The Informant!, Hollywood's comedic treatment of the deadly serious, 1995 price fixing scandal at Archer Daniels Midland, failed to...
The father of the Green Revolution
If pushed to guess, I suspect that few of the lengthy, laudatory obituaries published the week after his Sept. 12 death would have pleased...
Accumulated numbers we love
As many Eastern Cornbelt farmers nervously estimate just how many frost-free days (weeks?) they'll yet need to bin an almost certain to-be-late harvest, it's...
Sleeping with the fishes
If mega-biz is to be believed, the new antitrust chief in the Obama Department of Justice, Christine A. Varney, is really a hurricane whose...
The company you keep says it all
In the long, expensive battle fought by U.S. farmers to make corn-based ethanol the premier alternative fuel in America, few Washington influence peddlers fought...
The GIPSA watchdog better bite
Who is J. Dudley Butler and why are meatpackers and their allies saying nasty things about the courtly, 61-year-old from Yazoo County, Miss.? The...
Uncle Honey was all thumbs
A morning thunderstorm ripped through my rural farmette recently and in its wake I found a front yard peppered with green walnuts, a sky...
