While Washington’s wheels turn — slowly — the day-to-day realities of farming are making 2021 another challenging year for dairy nationwide.
One job on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth was to walk just-cultivated corn or soybean fields to find the cultivator parts — disk…
It’s a rite of summer to fire up the grill and enjoy burgers and steaks cooked to sizzling perfection. Or, in sadder cases, charred to an unre…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A local grain company does well year-in, year-out buying, storing, and processing a few million bushe…
Our recently vaccinated family hit the highways and waterways in a major way this last month. Thanks to public investment, we have highways an…
It’s a widely held belief that if you want to get ahead in farm group politics, you can’t be political. Well, not overtly political, anyway. Q…
In farming, the late Farm Journal economist John Marten liked to say, we keep score with acres.
For the past two decades, the State of Wisconsin demonstrated to the rest of the country what it is like to offer a successful statewide progr…
After my first year at the Big U, I returned to the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth for a summer of work. The first task, however, wa…
Small business entrepreneurship is a key source of job creation for rural counties. These businesses generate economic activity that can multi…
Among all the great stories dairy can tell in 2021 as it celebrates National Dairy Month in June, from its reaffirmation by grocery shoppers t…
If up is up and down is down, it makes sense then that organic food — especially food that carries the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s treasu…
In Wisconsin, June Dairy Month is certainly something to celebrate. Wisconsin’s economic future and the long-term vitality of the state’s dair…
There has always been an attachment to agriculture for Wisconsinites. From the earliest days, the hilly landscape and fertile soils of the Dri…
This week marks the 28th anniversary of this editorial effort. In round numbers that’s more than 1,430 columns, a million words, and who knows…
Shortly after America’s largest private farmland owners, Microsoft billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates, acknowledged their pending divorce, so…
You’ve probably heard that $5 billion dollars from President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan has been dedicated to farmers of color.
On May 17, six farm groups joined voices to call on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Congress, and the Department of Justice to ensure a “m…
China is even hungrier, richer, and — to the delight of almost every American farmer — more impatient in today’s global food market than anyon…
Carbon payment programs offer a financial opportunity for farmers implementing important conservation on their farms and while there has been …
Nearly everything about Francis and Susan Thicke’s southeastern Iowa, organic dairy farm whispers bucolic: a herd of Jersey cows and calves gr…
Weather, commodities markets, futures contracts, equipment, inputs, soil, animal health, seed quality, land management, and debt. An American …
While everyone uses water, Americans use it up, noted Wallace Stegner, the preeminent writer of the West, in his 1992 book of essays “Where th…
As the economy here and abroad slowly begins to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s farmers and ranchers are ready to…
With the wave of a wand, you’re the boss of the Farm Credit System. You manage a portfolio of 592,000 ag-related customers holding 946,119 loa…
Spring weather is upon us, field preparation is underway on many Wisconsin farms, and on April 22, we celebrated Earth Day in Wisconsin. Many …
You may have heard politicians and the media use the line that schools should “open” or schools have a plan to “re-open.” This has caused a lo…
I was very young —I had just turned eight — to begin a torrid love affair but the St. Louis Cardinals made it easy. It was 1963, Stan Musial’s…