Food / Farming

Another Monopoly
September 10, 2026
If all goes as planned, President Trump is going to “save” Argentina by importing tons of their beef into the U.S. Never mind what will happen to our farmers and ranchers. According to Joe Maxwell, a Missouri farmer and President of the Farm Action Fund, “63 farmers go out of business each day in America.”   When asked how could this be, given that beef prices at the grocery store ...
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Back to School
July 28, 2026
Despite the passage of time, the basic medical school curriculum hasn’t changed all that much. A person technically holds the academic title of an allopathic  doctor (MD) as soon as they graduate. However, to actually practice medicine and treat patients independently, they are legally required to complete a residency program, which typically takes anywhere from 3 to 7 years depending ...
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Where Did They All Go?
February 9, 2026
When I was a kid, each summer, in our neighborhood, the ‘”bug truck” would slowly spray clouds of DDT to “protect” us from mosquitoes. It used to be that whenever you hit the road one travel ritual was to clean the bugs off your windshield.  There’s even a name for this concern: the windshield phenomenon. We were a bug-hating nation. Now, entomologists have documented the dra...
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Good News Is Always Welcome
January 22, 2026
Since 1850, according to regeneration.org, “industrial agriculture has created a legacy of water pollution, animal abuse, degraded land, and unhealthy food. It has been responsible for over a third of all carbon dioxide emissions generated by humans. Fortunately, regenerative agriculture is gaining in public awareness and financial support. Here are five examples of what might be ca...
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The Price We Pay
January 9, 2026
If you think the price we pay for groceries these day is high, the price Americans pay in health and wellbeing is even higher. Despite more attention than ever on how unhealthy our food supply is, Europe is miles ahead of us. For example: People with wheat allergies find the bread products in Europe safe to enjoy because the wheat varieties are often softer and lower in gluten, treating methods...
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Why Words Matter
December 30, 2025
Not that long ago, “animal husbandry” was the name of a branch of agriculture concerned with the day-to-day care of animals raised for meat, fiber, milk, and other products. Husbandry has a long history, starting with the Neolithic Revolution when animals were first domesticated, from around 13,000 BC onwards. Now the very same branch is called “animal science.” According to Will H...
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Food & Farming
December 8, 2025
I’ve wanted to write about my website’s Food & Farming Domain for some time, but where to begin? It’s such a complicated and vast topic. Now, however, I’ve found a way in by identifying some of the current issues and in the next post highlighting possible answers. Industrialization began just 80 years ago, after World War II when the factories were still humming when man...
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Who Owns the Land? (Part One)
June 6, 2025
“This land is your land; this land is my land….” If Woody Guthrie were alive today he might need to add another verse to “this land was made for you and me.” The amount of foreign-owned agricultural land has grown significantly in recent years. In 2011, 26 million acres were owned by foreign investors. In 2022, foreign-owned acreage grew to 43.4 million. In most states, very ...
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Rural America – What They Keep Getting Wrong
June 1, 2024
In February 2024, a new book took the latest shot at rural America - White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. It has caused quite a stir. Does the subtitle sound familiar? it’s the latest word used to sell books, scare people, and recruit voters. The title is primarily applied to describe “those people” living in flyover, nowhere land. In the book ...
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Rural America –Getting It Right
June 15, 2024
What’s In a Name? I hated the term “flyover country” long before I moved there and was curious about the phrase. It wasn’t meant to be the elitist slight it is now. In fact, according to Gabe Bullard writing in a 2016 National Geographic article, the term was first listed in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1980, influenced by the early non-stop, transcontinental commercial flights 30 year...
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Civilization
August 15, 2022
I just discovered a book – Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress. Full disclosure - I’m waiting for it to come from the library and love the book’s cover. I did see the author, Christopher Ryan, on a “Useful Idiots” podcast https://usefulidiots.substack.com/ ­and thought I’d share some of what Ryan had to say. And note: a few thinkers (especially the Hobbesian guys like Steven Pin...
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Who Owns the Land – Part II
June 26, 2025
Would you be surprised if I told you that these numbered circles represent a recent tally of data centers in the U.S. What is a data center? According to Cisco, one of the tech giants: “At its simplest, a data center is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and data. Data centers accommodate the following:   Email and file sharing, productivity ...
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