Articles

GUEBERT: Acorns, leaves falling

Somehow, a notice went out a week ago to all the blue jays in Illinois that the acorns on (what I think is) a shingle oak outside my office were ripe for the picking.

• Alan Guebert

GUEBERT: It's August, take a nap

One part of every day on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth was inviolate: the noon nap. Nearly everyone took one. We didn’t rest very long, just 30 minutes or so, because the farm work never rested long. The naps, however, were as integral a part of our farm routine as the big, noon dinners they followed.

OPINION: Long winter days become slow, dull

Only once or twice during all my school days on the farm did snow or ice keep us more than one day from learning and Luther. But the memories of all those special days still quicken the pace of a slow, muddy day a half century later.

• Alan Guebert

OPINION: Walking with giants

This Thanksgiving Day, like the previous three November holidays, will find the lovely Catherine and me about as far east from the harvested Illinois fields as one can get and still be on American soil. In fact, we’ll be on federal soil, just seven blocks from the U.S. Capitol, at daughter Gracie’s place in Washington, D.C.

• Alan Guebert

OPINION: A super bad, super undemocratic process

TV talkers and radio ranters briefly bloviated last week on the world’s population topping 7 billion. While 7 billion is a big number, it isn’t the biggest part of the population story.

OPINION: Again with the crop insurance?

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.

OPINION: Looking homeward on a well-traveled roadway

The usual six-mile drive home from Sunday church took a pleasant turn some weeks ago.

OPINION: Readers respond to columnists ideas in some unappetizing ways

Six months have passed since readers have had their say about me, my work and its effect on their digestive system. Turns out the first two often riles the third as in a mid-April emailer, who signed his missive “All Small Farmers,” noted.

OPINION: Like traffic roundabouts, moving left or right lands you where you started

The mid-June Congressional action on ag programs seems to confirm why Washington, D.C.’s streets feature roundabout upon roundabout: moving left or right — a big deal on Capitol Hill now — usually lands you back where you started.

Why Tobey Farmer died

On Nov. 10, 1918, Tobey Farmer, a corporal in the 365th Infantry Regiment, 92nd Division of the U.S. Army, died while serving his nation, and freedom, in St. Mihiel, France.

Columns

GUEBERT: Top reasons to love China’s purchase of Smithfield

There are dozens of reasons for American farmers and ranchers to be thrilled — nay, elated! — by Shuanghui International Holding Inc.’s proposed $4.7 billion purchase of Smithfield Foods, Inc., America’s biggest pork chop.

• Alan Guebert

GUEBERT: Some air coming out of farmland prices, rents

According to the Kansas City bank’s most recent ag credit survey, climbing input prices, “dampened crop prices” and “high feed and forage prices” have slowed land values a bit.

• Ag credit survey
• Alan Guebert

GUEBERT: Where’s my cow insurance?

SD rancher: "Somebody needs to ask why taxpayers are guaranteeing my neighbors $300 and $400 an acre profit through federal crop insurance to farm ranchland when I can’t buy any insurance — let alone subsidized insurance

• Alan Guebert

Dairy’s dive into the unknown

It’s one of American agriculture’s best truisms: Only six people in the world understand U.S. dairy policy and none of the six milks cows. It’s not true, of course. Only four people understand U.S. dairy policy. And soon it’s about to get worse.

• Alan Guebert

GUEBERT: Late corn planting in May

The first good corn planting day of spring finally arrived at my central Illinois farmette April 30. Like the month’s previous 29 days, however, no one within 100 miles used it to plant because near-record rains had washed April away.

• Alan Guebert

GUEBERT: SNAP will bite back if not funded

Cuts to food aid will cut farm sales and profits.

• Alan Guebert

GUEBERT: SNAP will bite back if not funded

Cuts to food aid will cut farm sales and profits.

GUEBERT: Ranchers paying for the right to lose

Chicago Cubs baseball fans and American cow-calf ranchers have two things in common. First, they can’t win for losing and, second, they pay heavily for the right to do just that.

• Alan Guebert

GUEBERT: Odious riders on poultry, genetically modified crops pass Congress

Congress needs more open lawmaking and fewer lobbyists, more bottom-up debate and less top-down dismissiveness, more well-lit transparency and less in-the-dark committee work.

• Alan Guebert

GUEBERT: Beware the coming market calamity

The money underwriting it all, he claims, is not coming from a healthy, stable economy but from the Federal Reserve’s “egregious flood of phony money” that has “expanded [the Fed’s] balance sheet six-fold, to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion,” since the year 2000.

• Alan Guebert