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, Wis., where 50,000 visitors and vendors from nearly 100 countries will see 1,800 owners exhibiting 2,500 or so …

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% 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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

When word came out of Texas on April 1 that avian flu had made another unwelcome hop — this one from a dairy cow to a human — the news seemed like an April Fool’s joke. It wasn’t. In …

Even when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finds enough baling wire to lash together the votes needed to pass the split, almost six months late 2023 federal budget, it’s little more than a signal …

Like much of the news anymore, the initial numbers from the 2022 Census of Agriculture were accurately reported, quickly downplayed — or even worse, ignored — by most Big Ag groups, and then just …

Recently, a retired friend asked if I planned to retire anytime soon. It was the right question. While I have considered retirement, I explained, I have no real plans — soon or otherwise — to do …

At the height of the Christmas giving season, the governors of Iowa and Nebraska, two largely rural, heavily agricultural states, chose to play Grinch by turning down tens of millions of federal food …

Founding father Benjamin Franklin was spot-on almost three centuries ago when he noted–in print, no less–that two unavoidable facts of life were death and taxes. Had Ben been in the …

“Mathematics,” once explained Edward Frenkel, a renowned mathematician and author, “directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its shapes and curves, [and] holds the reins of everything …

Whoever leads the U.S. House of Representatives, that Speaker will have less than a month to push through a workable federal budget, compromise with Senate Republicans to craft an Israeli-Ukrainian …

The cattle market’s future, like the West’s wild and rowdy past, will feature sweat, brawls and blood. And that’s just the meatpacking side because today’s fast-thinning cattle numbers, …

One of the last giants of the 1960s and 70s Green Revolution, M.S. Swaminathan, died at his home in Chennai, India, on Sept. 28. He was 98. Swaminathan was to India what Norman Borlaug, the Iowa …