When you set a record ag trade deficit for the third consecutive year, the decline isn’t an aberration or a coincidence. It is, in fact, growing proof that a key element of your national ag …

Few states or nations put on a dairy cattle show like the World Dairy Expo in Madison, WI, where 50,000 visitors and vendors from nearly 100 countries will see 1,800 owners exhibiting 2,500 or so of …

In our increasingly urgent quest to clean up our climate-altering, carbon-fueled culture, biodiesel and renewable diesel have become two new darlings of alternative fuel advocates. While diesel …

Rain makes grain, and two mid-August Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports offered this year's first in-the-field look at just how much corn, soybeans, and wheat–as well as other crops like …

Milton Friedman, the patron saint of free markets and a founder of the Nobel-adorned Chicago school of economics, took a very dim view of all tariffs — ours, theirs, anyone's. Writing in …

Nearly 45 percent of all agricultural workers in the U.S. today—950,000 of an estimated 2.2 million farmworkers–are "unauthorized" migrants working illegally on American farms and …

Trying to stem the flow of money in American politics is like trying to hold back the Mississippi River. It’s dirty, dangerous work that, in the end, is almost always washed away by a flood of …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

Early in my first year at the Big U, a new friend from Chicago’s south side asked me what he thought was an innocent question. “You’re from southern Illinois,” began Vince, “so why don’t …

Long before it became a cliché, there were many heroes who never wore capes. I met one: the rail-thin, then-86 year old Theodore W. Schultz, in his sun-filled, University of Chicago office on a …

Federal policymakers and their Big Ag friends have a problem: Their hope to make corn and soybeans the feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) hit a wall when the aviation industry ruled that …

The easiest way to win any game is to rig the rules. That’s what Big Ag and its loyal boosters at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) appear to be doing to make sure their new project, …