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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 and build new, huge, highly-efficient slaughtering plants. The story was a clanging bell that a sec...

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 the “bookwork” season, the dreaded prison of bank statements, depreciation schedules, and tax for...

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 these venomous reader-written notes because they are “the ones intent on getting you off the page and...