There are just 11 weeks left in 2018. In other words, 78.9% of the year is already over. Done. Gone. That is time we will never get back. …and really, when you factor in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, we’re really talking about 10 weeks of business left to do this calendar year. […]
Soybean prices are as low as they’ve been in a decade, and corn prices aren’t any better. Last week I delivered a presentation on the topic of agricultural trade in the Trump Era to farmers in Northeastern Montana, and the theme I hammered was the role uncertainty plays in the markets, and how President Trump’s […]
Covering “agricultural issues” is a pretty random grab bag of loosely-related topics. At present, I’m reading up on issues as varied and interwoven as dairy consumption in India, recent research on intermittent caloric restriction, and African Swine Fever. Two such random topics got me thinking over the weekend about how we, particularly in the developed […]
Nineteen years ago, a legend of agricultural education informed me in no uncertain terms that I was not only a member, but a leader of one of the biggest cults in the United States. That cult? The National FFA Organization, known still by many by its original name, the Future Farmers of America. That legendary educator, […]
Farmers deal with a great deal of uncertainty by the very nature of their business. Will it rain? Will prices go up or down? Will pests or diseases destroy my crop? The combined forces of agronomic, meteorological and economic uncertainty are no doubt factors in the declining number of farmers in the U.S., and the […]
It’s not much of an elevator speech, but distilled to a single sentence, I sell advertising for a living. I’ve been involved in the profession of sales in one way or another for at least 10 of my 16-plus years in agribusiness media, and it is both one of the most challenging and most rewarding […]
A New York Times headline captivated me this morning: Motherhood in the Age of Fear. To be honest, it was actually the Twitter post promoting the story that pulled me in: Kim Brooks writes, “We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct […]
A number of anti-Monsanto, anti-biotech groups and activists have pushed the notion that consumers “have the right to know” if the food they consume contains ingredients from genetically-modified crops. For the most part the agriculture industry – minus some, but not necessarily all, organic producers and groups – have opposed this concept based on the […]
That headline was a bit of clickbait, wasn’t it? I’ll explain the cute cows thing in a moment. First though, an admission: I hate writing headlines. From the time I started writing the news professionally, I’ve always hated that one specific part of the writing process. If you’ve not worked in a newsroom, this might […]
Some weeks ago I read a brilliant New York Times Magazine essay on Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis, the retired Marine General tasked with, as the essayist put it, holding the line in President Donald Trump’s “War Cabinet.” I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for stories about great leaders in general, and generals in specific (Patton […]
