Page 18 - Alan Guebert News Today

JBS wasn’t — isn’t — the only global meatpacker making an already dirty business even dirtier. Other packers are targets of ongoing market investigations while some, like Tyson Foods, have joined JBS in paying millions to settle civil suits.

Farm and Food: Local growers and rural grocers should be allies By Alan Guebert If you think growing food in rural America is a tough business, you should try selling food — groceries — in rural America. Just how tough is it? The 2019/20 Minnesota Rural Grocery Survey Report that found 77% of the state’s rural grocery stores make “an average or lower than average net profit of 1.1% after taxes.” As thin as that ice might be, the Minnesota report, conducted by Regional Sustainable Deve...

Farm and Food File: Rural America shouldn’t be a dump site for corporate America Alan Guebert There’s a clear lesson in the chemical and ethical cloud now shrouding AltEn, a 25-million-gallon per year ethanol plant just south of Mead, Nebraska. In fact, there’s more than one lesson but the big one — how rural America is becoming a legal dumping ground for wastes created by corporate America — may be AltEn’s enduring legacy. The plant, opened as E3BioFuels in 2007, was to be unique b...

Farm and Food Alan Guebert

Farm and Food File: The best way to start is to start Alan Guebert Forty years ago, two editors at Successful Farming magazine, Gene Johnston and Dean Houghton, won most major ag journalism awards with a story titled “Who will kill the hogs?” The piece (not available online) tracked a new, potent shift just beginning to hit the 600,000 hog farmers in the U.S.: Local meatpackers were being squeezed for hogs and markets by other, aggressive packers that were buying competitors to shutter them...

Farm and Food: The best way to start is to start By Alan Guebert Forty years ago, two editors at Successful Farming magazine, Gene Johnston and Dean Houghton, won most major ag journalism awards with a story titled “Who will kill the hogs?” The piece (not available online) tracked a new, potent shift just beginning to hit the 600,000 hog farmers in the U.S.: Local meatpackers were being squeezed for hogs and markets by other, aggressive packers that were buying competitors to shutter them...

Farm and Food Alan Guebert

The Capitol seems more a church than citadel, a place where the voices of American saints, our patriots, prayed for us, the living.

Happy slow, quiet, dull New Year Alan Guebert The Farm and Food File The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day was wonderfully different than every other week of the year on the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth. Overall, it was the slowest, quietest, and — especially for my hardworking parents — dullest week of the year. Most post-Christmas weeks, Mom and Dad napped longer than usual, actually had time to enjoy Mom’s great meals, and slowly dipped their collective toe into t...

Alan Guebert The Farm and Food File The last column of the year usually features comments from readers whose views differ from those found here the previous 50 or so weeks. Most point out, often in vivid language, the shortcomings of my ideas, opinions, and — increasingly — the “fake news” I peddle through both. At least that’s how it has been for at least 25 post-Christmas columns. Not this year, however, because I received a reader email Dec. 9 that asked me to stop highlighting the...