Drill, baby, drill: It’s costing us
On Sept. 7, the nation’s second easy credit party in the last 30 years ended exactly as the first one ended: A fiscally conservative...
On the road: WDC, Boston and old age
Somewhere along the 2,684-mile, mid August drive from central Illinois to Washington, D.C., Newport, Boston and back, I crossed an unseen line into old...
Nothing hotter than an August Sunday
The only thing hotter than the August nights on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth were the August days, and the only...
English for the English speaker
As a trained professional in most things English (the language, not the nation), and with the Labor Day kick-off to the election season just...
Seed giant flexes its muscles
In late March, Monsanto Co. sent a “Dear Valued Customer” letter to most U.S. corn and soybean farmers.
The reason, wrote Jim Zimmer, Monsanto’s...
It’s reasonable: Our money, our rules
The news from Geneva July 29 that the World Trade Organization's Doha Round of global trade talks had "collapsed" hardly came as news to...
The best of times, the worst of times
The American economy is downright Dickensian. If you're in investment banking, airlines, real estate or automobile anything, it's the worst of times. If you're...
Tinkering with CRP could be costly
When Farm Journal’s late staff economist John Marten explained the-then new Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the mid-1980s, he did so with a clever...
Who wins in world trade deals?
Can anyone explain why the biggest haters of the "nanny state" are also the biggest supporters of the biggest nanny the world has ever created?
JBS beef buy is bad for everyone
If JBS Swift's buyout of National Beef, Smithfield's beef slaughter operations and Smithfield's massive Five Rivers Cattle Feeding LLC, the nation's largest cattle feedlot with one-time capacity of 811,000 head, the three remaining firms will have over 80 percent market share of U.S. steer/heifer slaughter.
