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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 Development Partnership of the University of Minnesota’s Extension Service, still found many rural sto...
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 because methane from anaerobic digesters fueled by manure from a nearby cattle feedlot helped power i...
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 and build new, huge, highly-efficient slaughtering plants. The story was a clanging bell that a sec...