League of Rural Voters: Articles

League of Rural Voters: Articles http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles.html Farm and Food File: Mathematics--run! Long-time readers of this weekly effort know that, like most journalists, I do math as well as I do elephant tracking and space shuttle driving. Oh, I can do the simple stuff like addition, multiplication, division and, as the lovely Catherine often has reason to note, "a little subtraction," but calculus? Whoa, daddy. Because of this easily seen blind spot, stories written by journalists who do do math are, to me, not just revealing but remarkable. For example, a Dec. 6, 2011 Wall Street Journal story, titled "Oil's Growing Thirst for Water," included the mathematical facts on "whether the underground water in south Texas can support both ranching and energy exploration." The operative paragraph in it reads: "Mr. Brownlow, who has a Ph.D. in geochemistry, says it takes 407 million gallons to irrigate 640 acres and grow about $200,000 worth of corn on arid land. The same amount of water, he says, could be used to frack enough wells"--fracture subterranean rock to release its oil and gas--"to generate $2.5 billion worth of oil." So 407 million gallons of south Texas water will yield either $200,000 of corn or $2.5 billion of oil and gas. That means there are 12,500-times more reasons to use the water to extract oil and gas than to grow corn and cows. Wow. It also suggests that all today's feed-the-world talk has about a one-in-12,500 chance to come true because we'll likely use ever-increasing amounts of ever-more-scarce water to pump oil to fuel cars to drive to grocery stores to look at empty shelves rather than use it to grow food to fill those shelves. Or is my math wrong? If correct, this sounds like something for Congress to examine--they can do math, right?--as it seeks balance in the nation's natural resource policy. Then again balance is not what Congress seeks in an election year; re-election is what Congress seeks in an election year. That means, according to Capitol Hill watchers, little substantive legislation on any key issue like deficit reduction, the environment and agriculture will move anywhere, if at all, in 2012. That could fire up voters to fire some senators and congressmen in November, eh? It happens more often than you may recall. For instance, according to numbers posted Jan. 17 by the National Journal, 105 of the House's 435 members, or (I think) 24 percent, in 2010 either quit, ran for another office or were defeated in the election. Likewise, in 2010, 21 Senate incumbents either retired, resigned, ran for other offices or were defeated. That'd be... hmmm... right, 21 percent turnover. And, already in 2012, 10 senators have chosen to either retire or resign and 35 House members have said they will move out. That means (take several deep breaths before we dive into the very deep water of addition + division!) in just two years at least 31 percent of the Senate and 32 percent of House will have turned over. Even more remarkable, if the 2008 election results are folded in the above numbers, 197 of the House's 435 seats--or a stunning 45 percent--will have new suit pants or pants suits warming 'em in just 4 years come next January. In the Senate, the numbers are nearly as startling: 41 seats, or (got it!) 41 percent, in just four years. Coincidentally, four years ago was the last time Congress's overall approval rating even touched the very mediocre 30 percent mark. On Jan. 16, a Washington Post/ABC News poll put that approval rating at 13 percent. Hey, look at the bright side: Congress's approval rating and Mitt Romney's effective federal tax rate are almost the same. At least I think so. (c) 2012 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-.html Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:51:11 GMT Farm and Food File: I believe Some people believe in tillage, others in no-till. Some people believe in planning; others in fate. Ask an American farmer if he believes a big part of his destiny includes feeding the world and he'll likely say, "Yep." The answer is quick and sincere because somewhere in every farmer and rancher's makeup is a "feed the world" gene. Our fathers probably picked it up back in the 1970s. They passed it to us and now its just part of our DNA. But believe as we may, the numbers--here, there, everywhere--continue to conspire against us. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the world has never produced more food, fed more people and, simultaneously, never had so many hungry people. Recent FAO data shows that about 13 percent of the world's population, or nearly 1 billion people, now live in chronic hunger. In 1981 the percentage was higher, 21, but the number was 150 million lower. Part of the problem is math. The world's people simply out-reproduce what the world's farmers and ranchers increasingly produce. If forecasts prove accurate, however, birth rates will decline and global population will peak near 9 billion in 2050. That suggests global hunger will peak, hopefully, in the next 40 years, too. It also suggests that global hunger has a life of its own. Sure, we send the world massive tonnages of grains, red meat, poultry and other foodstuffs; record dollar amounts, in fact, in 2011. But very tiny amounts of U.S. food exports are sent to hungry nations. Indeed, explains a new report from the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis, in 2009 "72 percent of all U.S. corn exports went to the top five export destinations"--Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and Egypt--"while only 9 percent went to the 70 nations designated by the United Nations FAO as Low-income Food Deficient (LIFD)." The story is similar in soybeans: "In 2009, more than half of U.S. soybean exports went to China. After China, the largest export destinations... were Mexico, Japan and the European Union. LIFD (food deficient nations) received only 1 percent of the total." (A link to the IATP report is posted at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com.) Neither fact is an indictment of U.S. farmers. Each, however, is a direct consequence of U.S. farm policy. While we may believe our destiny includes feeding the world's hungry, Farm Bills are directed toward selling food to the world's wealthy. And that makes perfect sense because you can't sell corn or wheat or beef or pork to people who have no money. But government policy plays a hand, too. "While corn production rose 28 percent from 2000-2009," Julia Olmstead writes in the IATP report, corn "exports only increased 2 percent over the same period, mainly due to increased demand for corn for ethanol production." As a nation we made policy choices that directed corn to be planted for fuel on many acres once planted for food. "From 1999 to 2009," Olmstead writes, "the number of acres of wheat (sown) declined by 6 percent, rice by 13 percent and peanuts by a startling 27 percent." All are "crops consumed directly by humans," she adds. Kinda' tough to feed the world if you're fueling Escalades and Range Rovers. Moreover, those choices continue to drive tomorrow's farm policy. Just last month producers of crops that lost acres to corn and ethanol in the last decade asked the writers of the 2012 Farm Bill to sweeten their federal protections--better target prices, better crop insurance--to stave off corn's acreage raids. While that policy effort failed when the Super Committee effort failed, the requests did not go unheeded. Rice, like ethanol, has its share of believers in Congress. So, what do you believe in--feeding the world or driving to the mailbox? Congress, and a billion or so hungry people around the world, want to know. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file--i.html Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:48:13 GMT Farm and Food File: No room in the gym A month ago I enjoyed a church dinner in the gymnasium of the grade school I attended 50 years ago. Back then, the gym sparkled with newness because, like the school itself, it was brand new, finished just weeks before I reported to the first grade as an equally new student. Over the ensuing half-century the school had been extensively remodeled but the gym had changed little. Roll-out, three-row wooden bleachers still lined the long walls of the same basketball court we were permitted to use only if it rained during recess. A raised, curtained stage anchored the court's south end while the north wall held four doors and the original scoreboard. The gym, then as now, served many purposes: athletic facility, auditorium, wedding hall, dining room, playground and, on occasion, church. Since German Lutherans are incapable of doing anything social without coffee and a light lunch of, say, roast beef, mashed potatoes, two vegetables, red Jell-O salad and either pie, cake or both, a kitchen was placed off one corner of the gym so hot lunches could be served to the schoolchildren and dinners to groups dining al fresco al gymnasio. Back then the biggest event in the big room was the Christmas school program. At 7 pm every Christmas Eve, 180 or so of us smartly-dressed little angels paraded into the gym to perform a lengthy, sometimes off-key line-up of Christmas hymns and Scripture readings for a standing-room-only crowd of proud parents and grandparents. While our singing and recitations may have not have been perfect, it wasn't from lack of practice. We marched and recited and sang for weeks in our classrooms and the gym because every word said or sung in both English and German had to be memorized. Well, mostly. About the eighth grade or so Oh Tannenbaum finally took root. Or was it Schnitzelbank? The week before the program Walter Voss, the school's janitor, slowly and methodically filled the gym with an ocean of steel folding chairs. The sea of institutional brown was parted only by a middle channel where we would pass through to the Promised Land, er, our assigned seats in the bleachers. The big show began with the gym darkened for dramatic effect. That was our cue to stop our hallway yipping and begin to remember the words of "Lift Up Ye Heads Ye Mighty Gates" to sing as we marched through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. And, no, not one flashbulb ever flashed and not one parent ever swooned during these walks down the aisle because, well, because we were Missouri Synod Lutherans. Yes, photography had been around longer than the Synod but that didn't mean we simply accepted it after 125 years. Ninety or so minutes of hymns and Old and New Testament verses later, the program ended with our exodus as children and congregation alike sang "Joy to the World." It may sound blasphemous to say we rocked that gym but that's exactly what we did--in joy, praise and thanksgiving. One Christmas Eve when I was in college I accompanied by parents to the program. As the children made their exit I spotted a boy wearing what had been until just four months before my blue, double-breasted wool blazer. My mother, who had made it for me for my high school senior pictures, figured I wouldn't wear it again and, as such, had donated it to the church. She was right; I didn't wear it again. Also that year, as in every Christmas program I participated in from 1961 through 1969, as the children passed the corner kitchen on their way out each received a paper sack filled with chocolate candy and oranges. Like I said, young and old, my people rarely gather--Christmas Eve included--unless there's a light lunch served. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file--no.html Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:45:12 GMT Farm and Food File: Your turn As we slip into the sweet week between Christmas and New Year's there's only one task to complete before clearing the desk and brain of all things 2011: readers having the last word in the last column of the year. First, though, thanks to all who offered me what I offered them--facts, opinions, ideas and memories. Reader responses arrived in record numbers from nearly 30 states this year to note how the column still inspires and infuriates. At least I hope so because, after 18 years of this weekly effort, the goal remains the same: to stir you, not the pot. And, for the 500th time and once more for Auld Lang Syne's sake, I do not write columns "to sell newspapers." I write what I believe. 'Course, if you don't believe that you can always drop me a line and tell me what you believe. Like "Neal" did two week ago when he sent an email disagreeing with a mid-December column that questioned the enormous impact America's ethanol program has on almost every aspect of our national farm and food policy. After listing ethanol's benefits, this "corn and soybean farmer who also raises cattle" urged that I "... stop the madness of telling people that ethanol takes corn away from feeding people." That wasn't true, he said, noting that "I am surprised you grew up on a farm." Another reader, this one with "43 years in the grain business" objected to the same column and ended his lengthy email with similar cautionary thoughts: "Remember who brung you to this dance" and to "not forget where you come from." Always good advice--even for the forgetful of us who can't dance. Several emailers complained about an early November column that questioned the possible expansion of crop insurance in the 2012 Farm Bill. One, who explained that he raised cattle and sold crop insurance, wrote to wonder why, if crop insurance was "so well connected in Washington," his "commissions were cut by 40 percent" this year. "Please do some homework before you write another article such as this," he suggested. "Not everyone involved in crop insurance is a Washington insider." One of my favorite letters this year arrived as an attachment to an email from a college professor. The working sentence in it read: "Your editorial... was excellent. It is actually one of the few you have written with which I agree." Thanks. I guess. Other emailers sent equally mixed messages. "I do not always agree with you or even understand what you write sometimes," noted Charles in Illinois, "but I find it interesting that some can't take a joke or the truth. Please keep up the good work." An emailer from central Ohio echoed that inverted compliment by suggesting "Perhaps we could get (Guebert) to run for office." Thanks, but I already have two offices: chairman and trustee of the local church. One more office, even if it's one of those cushy, 125 days-per-year gigs on Capitol Hill, would take time from what truly matters to my fellow congregants--knowing both Robert's Rules of Order and toilet repair. Few topics generate reader mail like the three or four columns each year that step back from today's political and economic hustle bustle to revisit the farm and community of my youth. Letters from those efforts are affectionate, generous and usually include memories of their writers. Like Reece from Cedar Falls, Iowa, who emailed in October to say that my story-telling columns "helped us know where agriculture has been and where it's going. And," he added, "I especially like it when you drop the hammer on those that so deserve it." Dropped hammers? I think you're confusing me with my delightful but deadly great Uncle Honey. Did I ever tell you of the time Honey was on a ladder and ... (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file--your.html Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:42:48 GMT Farm and Food File: Auld Lang Sighs Before this 2012 thing gets too far down the road let's take a sober second or two to review some of the more inventive ideas from 2011 and see if we can't make them work in the coming 12 months of political and economic stalemate. For example, an entirely new way of lawmaking was pioneered Dec. 8 when the U.S. House of Representatives easily passed a one-year moratorium on the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate farm dust despite EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's repeated promises in both House testimony and letters to Congress to do no such thing. In short, the House passed a one-year law to make it illegal to enforce a law EPA says it would neither propose nor enforce. Brilliant. With this legislative Everest--passing laws outlawing laws that aren't laws--cleared, Congress is free to spend most of this election year passing meaningless legislation against other meaningless, even non-existent, legislation. For instance, what would be wrong with a ban on the ban against the ban on carbon credits? Or, how about a law to outlaw any tax increase law that isn't yet law? Then there's re-regulation of regulations. Surely Congress will attempt the stiff regulation of what it says are the many regulations coming from the regulation-mad Obama Administration. Naturally, Congress would have to overlook a October, 2011, Bloomberg New analysis that showed the current White House had approved 613 new rules during its first 33 months, or 4.7 percent fewer rules than the preceding Bush White House that approved 643 new federal rules in its first 33 months. So, obviously, this area of non-need is in desperate need of action by an inactive Congress looking for straw men to make reelection hay. By the way, stop me if any of this is making sense because we can't have a new year begin by beginning anywhere but where the year that just ended ended. Another thing, since this is a Farm Bill year, don't count on Congress to write a Farm Bill. What, this group of aggies must again call the nation's three meatpackers, two grain exporters and one fertilizer cartel to testify on how difficult it is to feed the world without total control of world markets? Nope, ain't gonna' happen. These folks are beef barons, not oil oligarchs. Besides, look at the Oil Gang. Even as crude oil topped $100 per barrel, U.S oil and oil product exports for the first 10 months of 2011 were an incredible 665 million barrels. Who knew that America exported 27.5 billion gallons of crude oil and products--including 5.1 billion gallons of gasoline--even as American drivers were paying $3.50 for gas? Not me; you? Then again who knew that while prime rib was $16 per pound, 2011 U.S. beef exports through October were $4.5 billion, 37 percent higher than the record set in 2010? But don't let the fact that someone overseas got your $10 prime rib and $2.50 gas stop Congress from doing an even better bad job this new year. It has an unsullied record of muddy thinking for quite a while. Like from 2008 through 2010 when 30 of the biggest U.S. companies made a cumulative $164 billion in net profit and not only didn't pay any federal income taxes but also received $11 billion in federal tax rebates, according to a December report by Public Campaign, a non-partisan, non-profit group that tracks money in politics. How'd the Dirty Thirty do this? Simple; they spent $476 million, or about $400,000 per day, lobbying Congress those three years and invested another $22 million in election campaigns. (Read the full report at http://publicampaign.org/reports/forhire.) Given all that as background, you can see how it all makes perfect sense to pass laws against laws and to give tax breaks to those who don't pay taxes. Welcome to another year of living day after day like there's no tomorrow. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file--auld.html Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:39:26 GMT Farm and Food File: Colonialism 101 It's hard to see Iowa State University's key role in a plan by one of its top officials to develop an 800,000-acre farm in Tanzania as anything other than institutional polish to a massive African land deal for politically-connected financial titans. And, yet, there sits ISU, smack in the middle of a geopolitical web that stretches from its corn-and-soybean encircled campus in Ames to Wichita, KS, home to Koch Industries, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, one of two offices of Pharos Financial Group, and then back to Alden, IA, the base of AgriSol Energy LLC, a closely-held ag enterprise that's partnered with Pharos to use its "expertise to create agricultural businesses in underdeveloped global locations." The link between all is Bruce Rastetter, a one-time Iowa farmboy that now, according to the Associated Press, serves as Iowa's political "kingmaker." Rastetter is CEO of Summit Group, an "umbrella organization" that includes Summit Farms, his Iowa farming operation, and AgriSol, the Pharos-partnered company on the prowl for "global locations that have attractive natural resources." He was CEO of Hawkeye Energy Holdings, a 450 million gallon ethanol maker that, after a bankruptcy, was sold to a subsidiary of Koch Industries in 2011. He also serves as president pro tem of the Iowa's Board of Regents, the governing body for three public universities in Iowa, including Iowa State. And, too, in 2007, Rastetter endowed the Bruce Rastetter Chair of Agricultural Entrepreneurship at ISU for a reported $2 million. Rastetter was named regent (along with Craig Lang, Iowa Farm Bureau's long-time president who now serves as regent president) in July 2011 by Gov. Terry Branstad. At the time, many at ISU saw the appointment as payback for Rastetter's recruitment of the former five-term governor to, again, seek the office in 2010. Rastetter did little to dispel the notion. According to the AP, he "poured more than $160,000" into the Branstad campaign while his brother, Brent, contributed "an additional $31,000." (Branstad appointed Brent Rastetter to the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission in 2011. It was a controversial choice given Brent's expertise: owner of "a company that constructs hog confinement facilities.") Rastetter's African venture took wing last year when AgriSol announced its intention to bring "state-of-the-art farming practices, modern seeds and other inputs" to nearly 34,000 acres in Tanzania. The goal, according to AgriSol's website (links to it and other sources are posted at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com), was to "develop a new private/public/academic partnership model that combines large-scale, commercial farming with local outreach and outgrower programs for small landowners." The "academic" part of the formula included ISU. According to a Jan. 1, 2012 story in The Guardian, a national newspaper in the United Kingdom, the university's ties to the land deal were deeper. They included two trips to Tanzania in 2010 by ISU associate ag dean David Acker "to do preliminary research" on the land, and a memorandum between AgriSol and the Tanzanian government that noted "AgriSol would be 'working closely with Iowa State University.'" The Guardian story went on to explain that the deal, estimated now to involve about 803,000 acres, will pay less than $1-per-acre rent on its 99-year land leases. Also, according to the Oakland Institute, a think tank that investigated the deal in 2011, the AgriSol development "will... displace over 160,000 Africans." Why is one of the premier Land Grand universities partnering with a politically-potent Iowa ag prince in a $100 million African land deal that resembles something moldy out of 18th century than something new for the 21st century? Beats me, but ISU has spent the first week of January downplaying its links to Rastetter, AgriSol and Tanzania, claiming its participation now is mostly "advisory." Advisor or partner, ISU, through Gov. Branstad, still has a regent who views less than $1-per-acre rent for a 99-year lease on 800,000 acres of African farmland that will displace tens of thousands as a worthy enterprise to "create new markets and bring prosperity to Tanzania." What's next for ISU's ag school, Colonialism 101? (c) 2012 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file--colonialism.html Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:37:03 GMT Farm and Food File: The Good Old Farmboy Network Most folks are familiar with the Good Old Boy Network, a loose collection of family and friends that can be tapped for personal or business needs. Few, however, know that agriculture has it own network, the Good Old Farmboy Network. GOFs might include cattle jockeys, co-op board members, college alums and maybe even a state senator. GOFs are everywhere; you just don't see 'em. Take the GOF that has Iowa State University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences as its center and shares ag interests from Ames, IA to Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. The nexus of this network is a Chicago venture called the Rural American Fund. The fund, explains its website, "focuses on making partnership investments in growing middle-market rural American companies." (Links to all documents cited here are posted at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com.) RAF is small and has only four "strategic limited partners." One is Bruce Rastetter, an Iowa farmboy who's made millions in pork and ethanol and now serves as president pro-tem of the Iowa Board of Regents, the body that governs Iowa State University. Another RAF partner is Roger C. Underwood, another Iowa farmboy who co-founded Becker Underwood, "the world's leading supplier of non-pesticide specialty chemical and biological products" with "nearly $200 million in sales annually." ISU is a second tie between the two. While Rastetter, a University of Iowa graduate, is a university regent, Underwood is both an ISU ag alum and rainmaker: He helped direct the university's "Campaign Iowa State," a fundraising drive that gathered more than $850 million to "propel the university to new heights." Underwood serves on ISU's Foundation Board of Directors and the ag college's advisory committee. He and his wife also "established the Ag Entrepreneurship Initiative with a $1.6 million gift," in 2005. (In 2007, Rastetter gave ISU nearly $2 million to endow the Bruce Rastetter Chair of Ag Entrepreneurship at the ag college.) ISU watchers also whisper that Underwood's fundraising prowess--if not his own wallet--was behind the "first-of-its-kind endowed deanship" at ISU's ag school "thanks to a $3 million gift from an anonymous donor." The "first holder" of the post is ISU's current ag dean, Wendy Wintersteen. The other Rural American Fund strategic partners are Iowa farmboys, too--Jeffrey Becker, Underwood's business partner, and J.D. Schlieman, another ISU ag alum who worked 10 years for Heartland Pork and, later, was president of Hawkeye Energy. Both were Rastetter-controlled companies and both were sold. There's more. Another tie is Tim Callahan, a managing director for Pharos Financial Group in Dubai. On Jan. 21, 2010, Pharos announced it would invest $350 million in farmland in "developing nations to secure food supplies." One investment, the "leasing of 50,000 hectares of land in Tanzania," would be "complete by the end of the year." Shortly thereafter, AgriSol Energy, a closely-held Rastetter enterprise, made public its plans to develop vast tracts of Tanzanian farmland, also. Callahan's role in the deal is unclear but perfectly clear is his past employment with Rastetter. He served as advisor to Summit Group, Rastetter's Iowa farming operation, was a "principal at AgriSol Energy, a large scale farming, livestock and extension/outreach" --ISU's role--"project in Tanzania" and was chief financial officer of Hawkeye Energy, the nation's third largest ethanol maker controlled by Rastetter. Before that, he was a mergers and acquisitions specialist at Credit Suisse, an international investment bank. All that experience likely came in handy when, in Dec. 2009, Hawkeye Energy Holdings jumped into a $700 million, Chapter 11 bankruptcy that "essentially turned operations over to a consortium of lenders led by"--you guessed it--"Credit Suisse." (A Koch Industries' subsidiary bought Hawkeye in 2011.) If there are connections between all these farmboys, ISU and an enormous Tanzanian farmland deal, "endowed" Dean Wintersteen ain't buying it. In a Jan. 10, 2012 memo to ISU staff, Wintersteen denied the university had any "agreement" or "contract" with the principles of the Tanzanian deal. Technically, she's right. But a review of it, ISU's active role in its development and any real or perceived conflict of interest between it, influential alums and a regent is clearly in order. ISU's new president, Steven Leath, who takes over Feb. 1, could make it a priority. It wouldn't be easy. After all, rainmaker Underwood co-chaired the process that that yielded Leath and Tanzanian investor Rastetter was one of two Iowa regents on the 18-member search committee. (c) 2012 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file--the-1.html Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:32:43 GMT Farm and Food File: Listen up, hired hands It just might be that no one takes Congress too seriously because its members take themselves so seriously. How else do you explain a public approval rating of only 9 percent and still not one hint of any change in the collective behavior that has made the institution and its members as popular as chickenpox? Golly, even a blind sow finds an acorn every now and then. Not this bunch. For example, as the less-than-super committee swan-dived into federal budget failure Nov. 21, the leaders of the Senate and House Ag committees issued a joint statement that proudly proclaimed their "bipartisan, bicameral" effort to "generate sound ideas to cut spending by tens of billions of dollars while maintaining key priorities to grow the country's agriculture economy." What bipartisan, bicameral baloney. Almost no one who had any role in piecing together a Farm Bill as part of the failed budget talks called the final product "sound" or believed that it would "grow the country's agriculture economy." In fact, most farm groups, ag lobbyists and House and Senate Ag Committee members viewed the hastily written bill quite unsound and feared its "key priorities" would make a mess of today's largely market-responsive agriculture. The Senate's top aggie, Debbie Stabenow, D-MI, and her House counterpart, Frank Lucas, R-OK, the two who mixed up this legislative hash, had their doubts, too. Proof came Nov. 27 when The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress, reported that neither committee chair will "release the full details of their final (Farm Bill) framework, even to their colleagues." Why wouldn't the Head Clucks let their chicks in on the plan they were ready to give the Super Dupers and, possibly, make the law of the land? "Farm lobbyists," The Hill went to explain, "say this reflects the fact they do not have the backing of the committees for their proposal." Whoa, the daily double: a blinding glimpse of the obvious and the plain truth in one declarative sentence. So all this "bipartisan, bicameral" mush was really cover for one Senate Dem and one House Repub--whose joint experience at leading Congressional Ag committees equals their combined time driving 747s: none--to wipe their fingerprints off a Southern-tilted Farm Bill that would have never made it out of either committee had the normal, democratic process been followed. Moreover, despite the pre-flop spin and, later, their refusal to share their secretive, two-person plan, evidence also points to Lucas and Stabenow's inability to do math. Their Farm Bill proposal likely didn't cut $23 billion in farm and food spending over the coming decade that each said was doable in the run-up of the Super Duper's collapse. Hill sources now say the actual cuts contained in the bill were closer to $17 billion, far short of their own target and far, far short of the Super and the White House's talked-about target of $30 billion. Does any of this sound like "sound ideas" or "tens of billions" in cuts to maintain "key priorities to grow the country's agriculture economy" to you? Take out the spin and the best to be said about the twin failures of the Supers and the aggies is that both failed. This is good because neither had the slightest connection to democracy, political courage and thoughtful leadership. There never was anything "bipartisan" or "bicameral" about either. Instead, both were wasteful exercises in arrogance and hubris. The next best thing is that their failures open the door to our success. We--you and me--must direct these hired hands to do the work we need done. After all, that's how democracy works. 'Course, you already know this because that's how it works on every farm and ranch everyday. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-listen-up.html Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:54:03 GMT Farm and Food File: "... the least of these my brothers..." As the Sunday, Nov. 20 network news' yakkers were working hard to fix the blame for the Super Committee's failed attempts to fix last summer's failed attempts to fix Congress's failed attempts to fix the federal budget, 25 or so Americans gathered in a central Illinois church to hear their pastor explain that day's Gospel, Matthew 25: 31-46. For the faithfully unchurched or the faithfully forgetful that's the lesson where the Lord warns the world that, sooner or later, it will be separated into two flocks--sheep on the right and goats on the left. The sheep will "inherit the kingdom prepared for them" and the goats, well, they'll be very hot for a very long time. The message and the metaphor were not lost on one of those folks gathered that gray Sunday in Illinois. In a half-century of church-going, two decades of evening devotions and eight years of Lutheran school I had heard that passage at least 50 times. My understanding of it, however, was slow to evolve. For example, in grade school the reading brought fear. Goats? Eternal fire? What? Later, it brought confusion: Sheep on the right, goats on the left. OK, so where's the middle? Now, finally, it brings clarity. Right, left. Eternal life, eternal punishment. Got it. More importantly, the evolution made clear the path toward one and away from the other: "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." Simple, really. That I missed that point for many years was not because of my stern schooling or simple upbringing. I saw examples of great giving for years at school and on the big dairy farm of my youth but was either too childish or too arrogant to accept 'em. For example, two or three times a week a neighbor would send his children to our dairy for milk that we sold to anyone with a gallon jug and 50 cents. This neighbor, however, never paid. Instead, each trip and each gallon was duly noted, usually by those children, on a tab kept in a nearby cupboard. As the tab lengthened two things slowly dawned on me. First, the neighbor always sent his children because he didn't want the embarrassment of having to add to that tab in person and, two, the tab would never be paid. Shortly thereafter I realized that my father not only knew the tab would never be paid, he never acknowledged it even existed. His view, I reckoned, was that since we produced 3,000 gallons of milk a week, we'd never miss the four or five gallons the neighbor needed. After all, we had plenty and the neighbor didn't even have a cow. As such, two gallons here or two gallons there simply didn't matter. What mattered was doing the right thing. There was no debate, no cost-benefit analysis, no consultation with a committee and no telephone call to some government official. It was the right thing to do so he did it. Period. Besides, time paid the tab. The following 40 years leveled the cows, the dairy, the neighbor and the tab. All are gone; all accounts are settled. The proverbial sheep have been separated from the proverbial goats. Maybe that's something our mostly rich-to-super-rich politicians might want to keep in mind as they continue to deepen the divisions between the nation's rich and poor, left and right, Dems and Repubs, fed and unfed: Time settles all accounts. Also, since most of these slicksters are city slicksters, they might want to learn the difference between sheep and goats. Word has it that they are not the same either now or later. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file--the.html Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:51:49 GMT Farm and Food File: 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. Any national holiday in the District of Columbia comes with benefits but the winter ones, especially Thanksgiving, carry unique pleasures. First, the city is virtually empty. Most Capitol Hill staffers and their bosses are in North Dakota or Oklahoma or any of their other 48 home states. That leaves the 1,000-acre National Mall and its many--and all free--museums as quiet as the Aberdeen, SD Regional Airport on Easter Sunday. That's a double bonus because, outside the roasting hot month of July and the steam bath that is August in DC, Washington is one of the great walking cities of the world. Its Thanksgiving near-emptiness and usually mild Novembers make morning and evening walks a blessed retreat. The wanderings can yield bonuses. For example, on a solo, mid-Thanksgiving morning hike to the White House a couple of years back I was showing off my rural roots by not jaywalking across a perfectly deserted Pennsylvania Avenue. When the light changed and I finally stepped into the street a shiny Dodge pick-up cut me off mid-avenue. "Hey, fella," a lady in polar-fleece from ears to arms said out of the passenger window, "how about a hot Thanksgiving meal?" A big paper sack extended from her gloved hand. Uh, me? No, I'm just out for a walk. "You sure, fella?" she asked. "You certainly look like you could use a hot meal." She had a point. My hooded sweatshirt was more a billboard for Stihl chainsaw oil than warmth and a sun bleached St. Louis Cardinals cap looked like a Salvation Army retread. Three-day old whiskers added to my living-really-low appearance. "Take it," she said, shaking it like a wet cat. "It's OK to be poor." Well, she had another point--especially if you're in a chrome-dripping pickup truck and branded sportswear--so I took it and I packed it to the White House before handing it over to an even needier-looking guy shuffling slowly through Lafayette Park. "Happy Thanksgiving, man," he said as I gave him the bag. I took the long mosey back up the still-green Mall to the shiny Capitol, then around its Senate's side to the Supreme Court building to ensure its motto, "Equal Justice Under the Law," still covered its west facade and the nation. It did. A few minutes later I was back at Gracie's place, thankful that my dinner and family awaited and not a lukewarm meal from a paper sack. I'll make several DC treks this holiday. A short one will take me south to the Navy Yard and its stunning, almost secret museum, then back past Marine Barracks to a bike shop on Eighth Street. Another will swing north to Stanton Park, left to bustling Union Station, then maybe a quiet, slow walk through the National Portrait Gallery and then--who could have guessed?--I'll find myself in front of a favorite Irish pub near the Verizon Center. As usual, one hike will go west past the Washington Monument to again visit the brother of a high school friend at the Vietnam Memorial, to tremble (again) at the feet of Abraham Lincoln and to view, for the first time, the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. And on my way back to Gracie's each time I will, again, marvel at this city's striking monuments and wonder who among today's leaders might merit such honor and esteem. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-walking-with.html Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:49:10 GMT Farm and Food File: Bonfires of the boneheads The U.S. Navy has its Fleet Week, Major League Baseball its All Star Week and the U.S. government its Look The Other Way (LOW) Week. OK, the feds might not have an official LOW week but it's hard to find any part of government that stands up to the big money and big pressure of Big Biz. That includes our farm and food public servants at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For confirmation, consider federal action--or the lack thereof--in early November. On Monday, Oct. 31, MF Global Holdings Ltd., a Wall Street investment bank and the nation's third largest futures trading clearinghouse, disintegrated into the vapors of bankruptcy. The demise was not unexpected; the Wall Street Journal had chronicled MFG's dying wheezes for a week. And, yet, when MFG finally took the Big Flop, $600 million or so in customer trading account cash was missing. Some of the loot, reported Marcia Taylor of DTN, came from "cattle feeders and grain elevators whose MF Global accounts are missing large chunks of their futures accounts..." The big news here isn't that another boneheaded master of the universe took another Wall Street investment bank over a cliff. No, the big news is that no regulator--not the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, not the Securities Exchange Commission, not the Justice Department--stepped in to keep MFG from taking customer money with it. What, the bonfire from Wall Street's 2008 inferno still too hot for government regulators and Congress to sweep up these double-dealing cheats and chiselers? Earlier in the week, USDA acknowledged its role in stacking the deck to favor Big Ag's new poodle, U.S Farmers & Rancher's Alliance, the St. Louis-based effort to make today's genetically modified, verticalized agriculture look more like yesterday's warm and fuzzy farms and ranches. According to figures supplied by the department's Ag Marketing Service, $6.26 million in national checkoff collections went to USFRA in "fiscal year 2011" for such urgent items as "capturing and distributing informational interviews with USFRA board members" and to "develop four HTML emails for affiliates and strategic partners..." (Read the USDA memo at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com/_/Documents.html). Six million bucks ain't chickenfeed for an organization whose Big Ag members--like the American Farm Bureau, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, Monsanto and CropLife America--are some of the fiercest political players in Washington. But the windfall is more than half of USFRA's "less than $11 million" annual budget, according to information on its website. Not a bad haul from a source, federal checkoffs, that by law cannot be used for any political purpose whatsoever. Worse, USDA found the time to rule that non-political, federal checkoff money--$3 million from soybeans, $3 million from pork and at least $250,000 from beef--can bankroll an organization whose members are a who's who in farm and ranch politics but it can't find nickels to pay auditors to determine how much recent checkoff money the National Cattlemen's Beef Association misspent. By NCBA's own admission we know it was more than $200,000; by USDA's own pathetic planning it's likely we will never know how much more. That failure has a price. Part of it was made known Nov. 4 by USDA when, after 17 months of intense lobbying by meatpackers and their Big Ag allies, it advanced the GIPSA rule without key elements to ensure livestock market transparency and integrity. As if to celebrate its coming bureaucratic victory, meatpackers gutted cattle markets for $3 per hundredweight between Nov. 1 and Nov. 2, alleges R-CALF, the rancher group from Billings, MT. The $3 break, explains R-CALF, meant packers paid cattle sellers $5.6 million less for the 92,000 head they bought Nov. 1 than what it would have cost 'em Nov. 2. Golly, as old Ev Dirksen might say, $6 million here, $6 million there and pretty soon we're talking about a real bonfire. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-bonfires-of.html Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:46:44 GMT Farm and Food File: Pogo politics TV talkers and radio ranters briefly bloviated last week on the world's population topping 7 billion. While seven billion is a big number it isn't the biggest part of the population story. No, the biggest part of that story is tomorrow: by 2025, just 14 years from now, the world's population will be 8 billion and the number of people without adequate food, housing and education will be even greater than today's impoverished, illiterate 1 billion. Clearly, a caring global community needs to thoughtfully address problems connected with soaring population and, in the process, find ways to head off tomorrow's even more calamitous problems. Will it? All signs from today's poisonous political front point to a "No." It's not just global hunger and poverty that go unaddressed as political and corporate titans jet from crisis to crisis to moan about the financial or political problem du jour. In fact, little to nothing is done to address almost any problem because most solutions are met with either right wing or left wing claptrap and few political leaders have the spine or spit to stand up to the whackos and weepers. As such, the world wobbles from one bailout here to another bailout there. Worse may be coming. For example, world food stocks are tighter than a vest on a statue but most aggies spend more time clucking about fat farm profits than thinking how global markets will be remade by less food and more people. Meanwhile cartels for oil, fertilizer, seed, finance and telecommunications operate with little legal challenge and the world's growing wealth ends up in a dwindling number of hands. How did it come to this? That's easy; we let it. We handed off our responsibilities for neighbors, communities and the nation to a class of professional politicians who told us what we wanted to hear: we could have it all--roads, bridges, wars, pensions, schools, aircraft carriers, health care, clean water--and not pay for it all. And we got exactly what we paid for--bad roads, bad schools, bad food, bad health, bad wars and, now, a bad future. Worse, we're doubling our bets on this failing strategy by giving even fewer people even more power to determine our national commitment to key elements of our future. We call it the Super Committee, the six senators and six House members chosen by their political parties to, in the end, protect their pals on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue who are either too cowardly or too ineffectual to lead. How did it come this? We let it. Prove it to yourself. You're a politically-engaged, well-informed voting citizen, right? So name the 12 members of this group who now are meeting behind closed doors to make choices for you and your grandchildren. Uh... OK, name six. Four. Two? Little wonder the extremists have seized the process; we--you and I--have checked out. We can't have participatory democracy if we don't participate. Worse yet is the cronyism that flourishes under the Super Committee's dark umbrella. Committee chairs and ranking members of every stripe are--without the aid of one hearing, one vote or even one voter--writing important, multi-year legislation in order to stake out funding in the Super Committee's budget plan. For example, the 2012 Farm Bill is being pieced together right now by the four top aggies in Congress with little to no input from the 63 other members of the House and Senate Ag Committees. Call it what you will but you can't call it democracy. How did this happen? We let it. It was a mistake. And it would be an even bigger mistake to accept any legislation--a new Farm Bill, a 10-year budget plan--that comes from this super bad, super-undemocratic process. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-pogo.html Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:44:37 GMT Farm and Food File: Carpenters are not us Some serious outdoor carpentry this fall quickly proved, again, the enormous amount of woodworking skills I did not acquire on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth. It's easy to peg the origins of this deficiency: Working with wood on our farm usually meant picking up the remains of a gate or fence that failed to withstand the tractor driving habits of a hired man or older brother. Truth be told, two events dominated our farm woodcraft. The first was a firewood-making session in some distant pasture after a summer storm toppled a century-old pecan tree. The massive job required my father operating a balky chainsaw, the hired men hand-splitting the pieces with axes, and my brothers and me toting the straight-grained wedges to a wagon for hauling. The pecan, when seasoned, warmed the home of two hired men, brothers Howard and Jackie, who lived with their mother, Clara, and younger brother, Orlie, in a two-story house supplied by the farm. Howard, the oldest brother, was a maestro of the wood stove; he could make the family's Warm Morning stove radiate heat like the summer sun. A good sense of smell revealed his trick--a shovelful of southern Illinois coal on top of a bed of pecan embers turned the home's parlor into a Florida beach. Well, a Florida beach where someone was always frying pork. The remaining trunk of the fallen tree was hauled to a neighboring sawyer who cut it into piles of heavy, five-quarter two-by-sixes. The nearly indestructible boards went into fences around the dairy barn. The year's other wood-centered event was gathering the remnants of once-working fences, gates and other implements to heat three butchering kettles each February. That we had enough splintered kindling to keep three kettles bubbling with either water, lard or head cheese for two days was grim testament to our farm crew's destructive ability. Yet our collective wood skills weren't all destructive; sometimes they were constructive. For example, in the late-1950s or early 60s, I recall my mother's father, a talented woodworker by trade, helping my father build a 40-by-60 or so loafing shed for the farm's dry cows. It stands still, strong and square. We built other farm items from wood, too, like all our hay wagon beds and the boxes of our first silage wagons. Each was constructed by my father under the big maple tree next to our house from various stacks of knotty yellow pine. Dad's carpentry tools were few--a set sawbucks, folding ruler, hammer, square, good handsaw, nail apron and an electric circular saw--but, miraculously, a couple of days of measuring, sawing and hammering always yielded a wagon of some sort. Wow. Good as my father was as a wagon builder, my mother's father was a true craftsman. So talented was he that a farming life gave way to a career in carpentry, then to furniture building, then to pure art. Self-taught, Grandpa spent long, quiet days in his basement shop shaping, sanding and gluing together tables, chairs and, on occasion, church lecterns and pulpits. This small man of big ability, however, died young and most of what I remember of him and that basement is the earthy mixture of red oak and his sweat as he made another dining room chair or rocking chair that my grandmother later upholstered or caned. My mother prizes one his rockers and still treasures a small box of his favorite hand tools. I, however, have none of his tools or talent. I do have a piece of furniture he and Grandma collaborated on and its tight tenons and walnut glow hold secrets I long to know and likely never will. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-carpenters-are.html Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:42:07 GMT Farm and Food File: 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. Take the Oct. 17 announcement by Congressional aggies that Senate and House ag leaders had agreed to a "bipartisan, bicameral recommendation" to slice $23 billion from mandatory and discretionary Farm Bill spending over the coming 10 years. The move comes five weeks before the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction--the so-called Super Committee--reveals where its budget ax will fall to lop $1.2 trillion from federal spending over the same period. Ag cuts, reportedly, stack up like this: $14 billion or so to commodity programs, $6.5 billion to conservation programs, and $4 to $5 billion to food assistance programs. Remarkably, these proposed changes to your business, community and family were developed without one public hearing, not one witness to judge them fair or foul and, presumably, no junior member of either Committee saying one word. Capitol Hill can be a messy place nowadays but it ain't the Politburo. Public officials must conduct the public's business in public. Any deal coming from anything less than an open process carries the stench of cronyism. And, brother, this one does. The biggest stinker is how the crop insurance industry somehow, again, comes out smelling like a rose. Under the aggie plan "...crop insurance expenditures are largely left untouched," reported Politico, the Capitol Hill publication, Oct. 17, "and the numbers reflect a dramatic shift away from production or cash assistance and more toward new revenue protection or high-end crop insurance that would cover up to 95 percent of income." Such a deal: 95 percent of farm income--well, 95 percent of the income for Farm Bill crops such as corn, wheat, soybeans and cotton--would be protected. Poor you if you do something as non-ag as feed hogs or milk cows. Cows are exactly what the American Farm Bureau Federation had when it analyzed this out-of-the-dark idea of swapping more crop insurance for direct payments. In a warmly worded, three-page letter to every senator Oct. 17, AFBF Prez Bob Stallman slammed the swap as a "moral hazard" that would bring more risk into farming, drive up land costs and create "a further barrier of entry for young farmers and (become) another factor driving further farm consolidation." Way to go, Big Bob. All this activity--there's even urgent talk that a complete 2012 Farm Bill will be stitched together before Nov. 1, again, without one public hearing or witness--flies right past any debate of reforming or rewriting the current law. In short, no one is asking whether today's remodeled version of 1996's Freedom to Farm remains the best instrument to ensure the nation an adequate, fairly priced supply of food and fiber. Our good friend at the University of Tennessee, Daryll Ray, at the behest of the National Farmers Union, did ask. When Dr. D and his policy mechanics looked under the farm law's hood they discovered that federal farm programs cost taxpayers $152.2 billion from 1998 to 2010. And that doesn't include the tens of billions of taxpayer-subsidized crop insurance to farmers over those same years. Moreover, if the U.S had simply updated the previous Farm Bill's grain reserve policies, Ray figures the federal Farm Bill tab for the same 13-year period would have been $56.4 billion--or a staggering $95.8 billion less than what was spent. Why isn't that number and Ray's analysis key parts of the today's rush-rush, hush-hush Farm Bill hustle? Because the hustlers, as usual, are in charge of Farm Bill while you and me, well, we're the ones gettin' hustled. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-again-with.html Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:38:53 GMT Farm and Food File: The fix is in When Chairman Frank Lucas gaveled the full House Ag Committee to order Oct. 12, ranchers, farmers and other aggies who depend on commodity futures markets to price their crops, livestock and dreams might have thought the hearing would center on what its title suggested: "To Review Legislative Proposals Amending Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act." The hearing would do no such thing. Two days before, on Oct. 10, the Committee's Majority Staff circulated a seven-page memo to all members that outlined seven legislative proposals to amend the law designed to rein in American equity and futures markets' excess that nearly derailed the global economy in 2008. (Read the memo at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com.) Each of the seven proposals, though, sported two faces. The first was really a mask for the second: a legitimate question or concern about an some aspect of Dodd-Frank's trading rules. The second was the real deal: a primer on how to kill Dodd-Frank by sticking it with a thousand little pins--amendments, hearings, studies, cost-benefit analysis, lawsuits--and letting it slowly bleed to an irrelevant death. No muss, no fuss, no fingerprints. And, of course, no reform and no protection against the swindlers, crooks and banksters who skinned every American in 2008. That was easily confirmed by the so-called "Witness List," experts called to "testify" in the Oct. 12 "Hearing." They were bleating sheep in Congress's cash-green, astro-turf pasture, invited to endorse the Majority's biases and fertilize its false choices. The Oct. 10 memo provides the proof. For example, the memo goes into great detail over the role of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in setting margin requirements for "swaps dealers and major swap participants that are not banks." It then notes that the Majority's amendment "HR 2682 clarifies congressional intent by providing explicit exemption from margin requirements for transactions involving end-users that qualify for the end-users clearing exemption." How do we know that? By who will be coming to explain it, says the memo; Ms. Brenda Boultwood speaking on behalf of something called "The Coalition for Derivatives End-Users." If you think that Ms. Boultwood, an end-user speaking for "The Coalition for End-Users" on an amendment to exempt "margin requirements for transactions involving end-users," might favor such an exemption, well, you're catching on to how the Big Boys win the regulatory game. They simply fix the rules before the game even starts. But let's not pick on Ms. End-User. Other witnesses invited to speak in favor of Committee amendments to weaken, rewrite or simply junk Dodd-Frank language were such well-known aggies as Mr. Chris Giancarlo, who testified for the Wholesale Markets Brokers Association Americas; Ms. Bela Sanevich, representing the American Benefits Council, and Mr. Douglass Williams, the prez and ceo of Atlantic Capital Bank. And who represented you or spoke in favor of the Dodd-Frank reforms? Come on, you know the answer to that one. Maybe the best proof of these phony-we're-here-to-help hearings comes courtesy of the always bumping gums of House Ag Chair Frank Lucas. In his opening statement Lucas used jobs as the pretense to plow up large parts of Dodd-Frank and reseed it as the fertile playground of the banksters. "It is my hope," Lucas gravely intoned, "that the agencies will listen to the comments (and)... feedback they've gotten from market participants and from Congress. But with unemployment stuck at 9 percent, I'm not willing to just stand by and keep my fingers crossed that the flaws in the proposed rules will be fixed." The really worrisome part of that perfect nonsense isn't that Lucas and the other water carriers on the Committee sponsored this loophole festival. No, the real worry is that they actually believe markets regulate themselves. How'd that work out in 2008? (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-the-fix.html Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:09:44 GMT Farm and Food File: Socialism for capitalists Farming and ranching have always involved a lot of straightness. Straight fence lines, straight rows, straight dealing. Politics not so much. Twisted thinking, circular debate and, more often than we care to admit, crooked people litter the political scene. In fact, today's politics are dominated by the inside-out logic that doing nothing is better than doing anything. We even pay dozens in Congress at least $174,000 per year to ensure it. Small wonder then that so many with so little are so willing to fight so dirty to attain, then keep, political office. Life after office ain't so bad, either. According to the "Revolving Door" database maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics (http://www.opensecrets.org), 370 former members of Congress currently "receive handsome compensation from corporations and special interests as they attempt to influence the very federal government" they formerly served. This auction of public trust virtually guarantees special interests a 27/7/365 lock on national interests. For example, if you're a trans-national meatpacker you can purchase all the influence--fake economic studies, key committee people in Congress, astro-turf farm and ranch groups, solemn lobbyists--to make market-leveling regulations simply disappear. And the laws, like the competition, soon do. It might seem like sleight of hand but it's not. We see it. We even write and talk about it and, sooner than later, we pay for it. The deregulated, failing banks. An energy policy built on unsustainable fuels. A food inspection system that inspects almost nothing. Meaningless antitrust laws. Corporate "free" trade. Unlimited campaign spending. Add it up and it amounts to socialism for capitalists and capitalism for everyone else. The Big Boys bend and buy government to do their bidding--fewer regs, lower taxes, more subsidies--while you, with little money, no influence and no lobbyist, are told to compete. The first week of October showed this crooked approach to democracy in full bloom. On Monday, Oct. 3, the White House sent to Congress three trade deals (Panama, South Korea and Columbia) that have been hanging fire for years. Easy, swift--as in two weeks--bipartisan Congressional approval is predicted. That very day the U.S. Senate agreed, by a bipartisan 79-19 majority, to impose import tariffs on any nation whose currency is purposely "misaligned" against the dollar. The legislation, aimed directly at China, has zero chances of enactment because Big Ag and Big Biz will send its lobbyist poodles to nip it to death in the House so China's Western-owned factories can continue to send us stuff we don't need at prices that will be fully paid by our grandchildren. That the three free trade deals will sail unquestioned through Congress in 15 minutes and the China currency deal won't make it out of Congress in 15 years is more proof of our democracy's growing dysfunction. People come second to profit. Only one major ag leader, Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, questioned the need for the trade deals and the principles of our soon-to-be biz partners. While "Agriculture has been one of the few sectors (in the U.S. economy with)... a trade surplus," Johnson noted Oct. 3, it also has had "a net trade deficit in seven of the past eight years with countries that the U.S. has trade agreements." That red bottom line is written in blood for some of pending trade partners. In Columbia, for example, Johnson added, more than 2,800 trade unionist have been murdered since 1986; "51 in 2010 alone." So that's our business plan; become partners with folks we wouldn't share a cup of coffee with in the hope--a vain hope, according to the record--of selling them a bushel of corn or a pound of ribs? Little wonder so many people in this glorious nation think we're headed straight off a cliff. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-socialism-for.html Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:06:51 GMT Farm and Food File: Roads taken The usual six-mile drive home from Sunday church took a pleasant turn some weeks ago. As I headed back to the farmette for more coffee and more newspapers, my mind went a different way and, without one turn of any wheel, I was on my way to the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth. Back then most Sunday drives home from church featured three elements: a well-scrubbed Ford station wagon with at least five kids and no seatbelts in its back seat; the car radio relaying the tape-recorded highlights of the St. Louis Cardinals' past week and the penetrating smell of my father's slow-burning Camel cigarette. If it was summer, all the windows of the big-fendered boat would be down so we could enjoy what was sure to be the closest thing to air conditioning we'd feel all week. Winter delivered the opposite: windows tightly closed so the rolling oven would (we vainly hoped) roast us well-done so we'd remain warm for seven days. And spring, summer, fall or winter we boys--Rich, David, me and Perry--sat like straight-backed little sinners all in a row, felt hats atop no-smile faces made stiff by starched collars, narrow ties and real fear of an angry God. Or so it seemed. Back then the pre-war Lutherans, pre-World War I, that is, were long on Law and short on Love. When a young minister arrived in the mid-1960s and began to teach the New Testament as much as the Old, mild grumbles about too-little Law and too-much Gospel filtered through after-service visits in the churchyard. My parents, to their eternal credit, never passed on the gripes. They found little fault in their new shepherd's preaching and no fault whatsoever in his perfect, dairy-county name: Pastor Holstein. True; I couldn't make that up. Nobody could make that up. In the 100 or so drives to and from church each year, the after-church drives during the fall were best. In almost half of those 1960s Septembers and Octobers, the Cardinals were either fighting for a pennant or a World Series ring. That made the Sunday radio replays like a victory lap; we knew how they ended so we'd cheer before Jack Buck or Harry Carey joyously announced a Bob Gibson strikeout or Lou Brock stolen base. Wow, we loved those teams. Still do. A curious little irony of the drive home, however, was that we Lutherans spent most of it on St. Leo's Road, a meandering blacktop named after a middle-of-nowhere Catholic church that commanded the high bluffs overlooking our farm. St. Leo's, its rectory, social hall, empty one-room school and burying ground seemed both misplaced and perfectly placed. Misplaced because few farms and fewer people were nearby; well-placed because from the shade of its broad maples you could see the confluence of the Kaskaskia River with the Mississippi miles away. A second lovely irony each week was that on our way to church we usually chugged through this little outpost of Rome just as the Papists were letting out. That meant we had to toss a weak wave or smile at our oh-so-heathen neighbors while my father would smile and acknowledge the men folk--"Hey, Gary"--through his open window. We'd slowly putter through, then head for the Lutheran bastion farther up the road and, hopefully way, way up the road, heaven. Three hours later, heaven and hell were left behind and 18 or so miles to home beckoned. Recently, it beckoned again. Maybe it was the crackling blue sky that fine morning or maybe it was the smell of harvest, thin and drought-starved though it is this fall. Or maybe it was just a graying farmboy, having just heard the Word, looking homeward. (c) 2011ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-roads.html Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:03:14 GMT Farm and Food File: Homestead Act an American story Already deeply engaged in a bloody war, a young, untested President--whose thin resume noted but a handful of undistinguished terms in the Illinois General Assembly and a brief stint in Congress--did not hesitate when Congress delivered legislation that might spark a new beginning for a tiring nation. When Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862 he sent a clear signal to all Americans that he believed the Union would endure and it would stride toward its greater destiny with a new element of freedom, land. Lincoln, of course, was right. The Homestead Act became one of America's most enlightened--and to Native Americans, most damnable--moves: 1.5 billion acres owned by the federal government would be offered to nearly anyone for the taking, a fabulously radical idea in a world still mostly owned by nobles and aristocrats. Next year marks the Homestead Act's 150th anniversary and plans are underway for a year's worth of activities at the National Park's Service's Homestead National Monument of America, 40 miles south of Lincoln, NE. (http://www.nps.gov/home/index.htm) "Many of the events that shaped 100 years of American history had their beginnings in the Homestead Act," notes Mark Engler, superintendent of the site. Some, such as Land Grant university system and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, remain key parts of American society today, he adds. All were an extension of Thomas Jefferson's yeoman-farmer ideal for the nation. Two generations after his buy-now, tell-Congress-later purchase of the Louisiana Territory and 36 years after his death the ideal reached its zenith: anyone 21 years old--including single, unmarried women--was entitled to 160 acres of America. Few restrictions to "homesteading" made it attractive to both Americans and any immigrant who had filed an "intention" to become a citizen. All you had to do was swear to not "taken up arms" against the nation, move to the land within six months of its survey and filing and, most importantly, "improve it"--settle and farm it. If those conditions were met and $10 was paid, the land was deeded to the homesteader--patented, as it was called--after five years. According to data compiled by the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, 3 million people applied for this "source of opportunity and wealth" over the succeeding 77 years the law was fully in force. Even more remarkably, almost 1.5 million "households were given title to 246 million acres of land" by 1939, or, "approximately 20 percent of all public land in the United States was given away" by the nation to it citizens. And it just wasn't in states most Americans consider homestead havens; it was in virtually every state west of the Allegheny Mountains. For example, 24 percent of Arkansas, 20 percent of Minnesota and 29 percent of Wyoming were "successfully" homesteaded. And, too, states most thought of as homestead-settled were, indeed, settled by homesteaders--45 percent of Nebraska, 30 percent of North Dakota, 35 percent of Montana and 34 percent of Oklahoma. (The last homestead "patent" was granted in 1988 to Ken Deardorff for his piece of Alaska.) But the unique law was not universally accepted. The first Americans, Natives of the more than 500 nations already established in what was to become the United States, viewed it as a leading cause for their cultural decline and virtual demise. Many still do. In fact, because of the Homestead Act, "Promoters, frontier settlers, and fur traders pushed the government to enter treaties with Indians which today would be regarded as unconscionable," notes Washington University research. That legacy, as well as the estimated 93 million American descendents of homesteaders, makes the Homestead Act a vital, still-alive piece of American history. (c) 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-homestead-act.html Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:00:49 GMT Farm and Food File: What am I missing? On a near-perfect harvest day in yellowing central Illinois a gentle breeze rattles the drying maple leaves near my back door. The whine a distant combine adds a background vocal and white clouds in a crayon blue sky hang over all. Thirty feet from my bare feet Maggie the Dog dozes in the shade of a linden tree for what's sure to be another all-afternoon nap. Despite this picture of peaceful contentment, I can't shake the feeling that I'm missing something. For example, U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance, the $30-million-plus effort by Big Ag to rebrand itself Small Foodie, kicks off that campaign Sept. 22 with what its image makers are calling The Food Dialogues, a five-and-a-half-hour long "interactive event taking place... across the U.S. and online." This "town hall-style discussion to address Americans' questions about how their food is grown and raised and the long-term impact of the food they are eating" will be uplinked from The Newseum in Washington, D.C., a television studio in New York City, a tourist-centered Indiana dairy farm and the Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at the University of California-Davis. Huh? Are farmers and ranchers really going to "interact" in an almost all-day, closed-to-the-public, webcast town hall meeting to talk about food, farming and ranching from a Pennsylvania Avenue museum, a New York TV studio and a West Coast wine institute just as the fall harvest season reaches full throttle? A better idea would be to convene dozens of open-to-all town hall meetings in farm and ranch country where local consumers can meet local farmers and ranchers instead of staring at scurrying electrons of paid TV talkers whose only connections to food are forks, spoons and an occasional spatula. After all, actual farmers and ranchers actually know how they actually farm and ranch and actually are more believable food sources than Ms. Talk For Money and Chef Copper-Bottomed Wide Body. Of course, I could be missing something here. I know I must be missing something when reading the latest GMO news. On Aug. 29, the Wall Street Journal reported that "Widely grown corn plants that Monsanto Co. genetically modified to thwart a voracious bug are falling prey to that very pest in a few Iowa fields, the first time a major Midwest scourge has developed resistance to a genetically modified crop." The second time, however, wasn't far behind. "Severe root damage observed in Bt corn in northwestern Illinois.... should alert growers to carefully consider 2012 seed selection," Farm World, an Indiana-based regional ag newspaper, noted in its Sept. 7 edition. "This discovery," breathlessly explained the Journal, "raises concerns that... using biotech crops could spawn superbugs." That's not exactly news. Big Seed and Big Government foresaw the problem and devised a potential solution before taking the technology global: One in five corn acres was required to be planted in "conventional," or non-GMO, corn so rootworms would munch on it and not develop a taste for Bt corn. Well, at least it sounded like a good idea. Given signs of failure, however, is it a good idea for the Environmental Protection Agency to approve a new GMO corn variety that pre-blends a smaller, 10 percent conventional-seed refuge--and one with but a five percent, pre-blended conventional refuge--in each bag of corn seed? Maybe not, but EPA recently approved both new seed varieties in defiance of what a wise scientist friend likes to say is one of the world's most inviolate rules: "Nature works 24/7/365 to overcome anything mankind can contrive in a 40-hour week." Still, I confess, as this so-far lovely September ripens into fall, I could be missing something. Â© 2011 ag comm The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com. http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-what-am.html Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:57:07 GMT Farm and Food File: Don't worry, I got it So corn is rockin' north of $7, beans are toyin' with $14, cattle look to be headed to who-knows-where, wheat prices for almost every variety are tall to really tall, and hogs, well, bacon is sellin' for what steak used to. Wow, huh? And here are two more sweet words: land values. Second quarter 2011 farmland values in the Seventh Federal Reserve District, the buckle of the Midwest's corn belt that includes all of Iowa and most of Illinois and Indiana, rose an astonishing 17 percent over a year ago. And, yes, that was the largest year-to-year quarterly rise since the 1970s. What? What did I say? Oh, the 1970s. Sorry, what do I know? Probably not much because 36 percent of the Seventh District's ag bankers think farmland values will continue to increase while "just 2 percent... expect farmland values to fall in the third quarter of 2011," noted the Chicago Fed's August AgLetter. That's 18 bulls to every one bear and bankers are rarely wrong, right? So don't worry; be happy. Besides, scolds like me will do the handwringing over little things that might tarnish the golden harvest of September and October. Little things like, say, jobs because--just guessin' here--it's hard to sell $13 ribeyes to people without paychecks. Even worse (but don't worry, I'm on the case), the U.S. economy continues to shed well-paying jobs. Indeed, between Jan. 2001 and Jan. 2010, the number of American manufacturing jobs fell 32 percent, from 17.5 million to 11.7 million. During that same decade, the U.S. trade deficit for manufactured goods, according to Commerce Department data, climbed--ready for this?--an almost perfectly coincidental 30 percent. The big winner in that job and money migration was China. It not only got many of those 5.5 million former U.S. factory jobs, our annual trade deficit to the once-Red, now-barely pink nation soared from $84 billion in 2001 to $275 billion in 2011. The simplest, nearly universal solution to these debilitating trends requires political action: the American government must force a yuan re-evaluation that drains China of its huge--and hugely subsidized--market advantage here. Such a move, or even talk of such a move, is not good for you, U.S. farm prices, U.S. land values and any Chinese person who happens to eat. But it's very hard to see any U.S. job push without a similar push for Chinese currency reform and... Well, let me worry about that for you. While I'm at it, let me worry about Europe, too. I know you know that several of the Continent's national treasuries are under water. For example, Ireland's national debt to gross domestic product ratio is, whoa, 119 percent and Greece's is--ooh--158 percent. Those bad numbers likely will get worse because the European Union's economic growth is as sick as ours. Last quarter, U.S. GDP grew 0.3 percent while France's didn't grow at all and Germany's burped upwards a tiny 0.1 percent. Interestingly, lovely old Belgium, without a government for 17 months, was the Euro-zone winner last quarter as GDP there grew 0.7 percent. The lesson, cheekily wrote John Lanchester in the Sept. 8 London Review of Books, is that "(F)rom an economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government." Maybe for Belgium but not so for America, one-fourth the world's economy. More political stalemate here means more economic trouble both here and in Europe, a quarter of the world economy, also. As such, if one-half of the global economy continues to sputter, how long can $7 corn and 17 percent increases in land values hold? Relax, beans are headed to $14 and cows to the moon. What could possibly go wrong? Besides, I got it. (c) 2011 ag comm http://www.leagueofruralvoters.org/resources/articles/farm-and-food-file-dont-worry.html Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:18:02 GMT