Andy Vance

In yet another example of an emotionally-charged solution completely missing the mark on the actual cause of an important problem, hating dog breeders has become the hottest social trend. Let’s start with the legitimate problem: each year, somewhere between 6 and 8 million unwanted, stray or otherwise neglected animals are taken in by local animal [...]

Believe it or not, because Asian agriculture is rice-based rather than corn-centric, students from the Far East excel in mathematics. I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, subtitled “the story of success.” It’s a fascinating book, a fairly easy read, and a volume I would highly recommend (along with other similar “thinking” titles including Freakonomics and Talent [...]

Editor’s note: Before I started this blog in late 2010, I blogged for five years at BuckeyeAg.com. When I left the radio network that fall, my old blog posts were, much to my dismay, lost in cyberpurgatory forever. In a fluke of Google the other day, I came across a post that I wrote in [...]

Here’s the good news: despite Mayan predictions to the contrary, the world will not end in 2012. Even more, the world is not going to end because Barack Obama won reelection, though for nearly half of the nation, it may feel that way. Along with the good news, however, there is some bad, and none [...]

I’m sitting in a hotel lobby in Milwaukee waiting on a late-evening flight to Kansas City, and I have a confession to make: I failed to figure out a way to vote in Wisconsin. It’s the new Ohio, haven’t you heard? I spent the past two days at the annual Agricultural Bankers Conference hosted by [...]