Before 2024 slides into history, some noteworthy farm and food updates, please, to ensure these stories go with it.
First, on Dec. 10, two judges — one federal judge in Oregon, the other a Washington state judge — ruled that mega-grocer Kroger’s two-year-old, $24.6 billion bid to buy mini mega-grocer Albertsons won’t clear federal antitrust hurdles. The joint rulings effectively killed the deal.
While Kroger officials said they were disappointed with the doubleheader loss, Albertsons sought a scapegoat. A day later, it sued Kroger claiming the “grocery chain didn’t do enough to secure regulatory approval.”
The merger of the second largest U.S. grocery seller, Kroger, with the fourth largest, Albertsons, would have created a national chain with 16.5% of the market. Even at that, however, the combination would still be a distant second to retail giant Walmart, with 24% of all U.S. grocery sales.
Kroger isn’t the only Fortune 500 company ending the year on a downbeat. In late November, Deere & Co. reported a 16% drop in overall 2024 sales and an even harder hit in net income, down 30% from 2023.
John May, Deere’s CEO, however, took credit for keeping both numbers from sagging even more because, he said, “(W)e proactively adjusted our business operations to better align with the current environment.”
That’s MBA-speak for laying off employees. Green Deere played green Grinch to its workforce most of 2024, especially in Iowa where 1,700 employees lost their jobs in Waterloo, Davenport, Des Moines and Dubuque.
And it’s not likely to improve anytime soon after Congress extends the 2018 Farm Bill for another year. U.S. sales of combines for the 10 months ending in Oct. 2024, according to the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, are down 23%,
On top of that bleakness, new and largely untested leadership in the U.S. Department of Agriculture will need time to find their feet in the sprawling, 100,000-employee agency that spent $437 billion via more than 500 programs in 2024.
And all this will be taking place while the White House begins to deliver on two of its biggest, most worrisome campaign promises to American agriculture: migrant deportation and import tariffs.
Now stir in a potential bureaucratic turf fight between the newcomers at USDA and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services over food standards, and farmers and ranchers may long for 2024’s legislative dysfunction.
Hope for me, however, springs from John Thune, the lean South Dakota Republican who will take over as Senate Majority Leader after the 119th Congress is seated in early January.
Just how ardently polite and decent is John Thune?
In 2004, after a sweaty appearance at the South Dakota State Fair, officials from the state’s Farmers Union asked me to address several hundred farmers and ranchers at their state office just across town from the fairgrounds.
Tired and talked out from the long, hot day at the fair, I spent a few minutes handicapping then-Congressman Thune’s red-hot race for the U.S. Senate against the long-time incumbent and Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle.
Well, I did more than handicap the race; I took the hide off Thune as a do-little opportunist to ever-louder cheering and hooting.
After I finished — to thunderous applause — I turned around just as the next speaker, a young, ramrod-straight cowboy dressed in shiny boots, starched blue jeans and an ironed Oxford shirt, approached the podium.
“Hi,” he said warmly as he put his hand forward to shake. “I’m John Thune.”
And, he added as a broad smile broke across his tanned face, “That was some speech.”
