Climate change deniers in the U.S. probably should keep an eye on what is happening in Australia politically as a result of the historic wildfires that are ravaging the country. Australia had to mobilize military reserves to handle the relocation of people resulting from an area twice the size of Switzerland (25 million acres) or two West Virginias being on fire. ...

We get an up close and personal view of the Democratic presidential candidates because of our Iowa caucuses. There are frankly not a lot of rural Democrats where I live in the state and unless something dramatic happens Iowa will not be in play for the general election. ...

2019 was not what I would call a year that I want to remember or have fond memories over at the end, given my crops were planted on time yet still generated crop insurance claims. It doesn't matter what date they are planted on if the hail storm is intense enough. A high APH and RAMP crop insurance helped save the bottom line. So, let's shift and look back at the last decade of the 2010s as something being less painful to reminisce over while we try to forget 2019...

I come from a livestock family and married into one as well. When I grew up, we had dairy, layers, hogs and cattle on feed. I, myself, raised hogs and cattle. We adapted over time. The dairy went out first with the requirement for bulk milk handling the year that I graduated from high school. ...

According to USTR Robert Lighthizer, phase one of a trade deal with China is "totally done." I hope that the Chinese can come to Iowa, if not for the signing then at least to mend fences and nail down our new commercial trade relationship. A pivotal choice was made here with this trade agreement. ...

The recent death of former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker brought back a flood of memories from the ag depression of the 1980s. It was life changing to have lived through something like that. I started farming in 1973 when we were in the throes of an inflation cycle. ...

Unless something changes fundamentally, agriculture revenue prospects do not look any better next year although it would be hard for the weather to be much worse. That doesn't seem to matter according to the Department of Agriculture who can always make the acres rise even though prevent-plant was a record. ...

Whenever I go to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I make it a point to get a burger at Fuddruckers. I took my prospective son-in-law along who has trained in culinary school as a chef and he declared the burger to be one of the best he has ever had. I am in mourning as they closed the Fuddruckers in West Des Moines. My daughter in law is not a burger-fan but even she makes an exception for Fuddruckers. That is enough of a free commercial...

Democrats seem to think that what they need to sell farmers on is the need for cover crops and carbon sequestration. These are as much just talking points as anything else, politically correct agriculture, but if they are more than that, we should soon find out as adoption is tested. Farmers will accept innovation and incentives but force them to do something and you will lose them...

President Donald Trump has not been good for U.S. Agriculture. No president has had worse trade, biofuel and immigration policies that impact the agriculture sector than this one. It was predicted accurately by me. I was told that I was wrong, but time and events have proved otherwise. ...

Postscript from the previous columns: I was most impressed by the quality and sophistication that the editors of Successful Farming and Farm Journal magazines put into their periodicals nearly a century ago. They were lengthy, thoughtful and intelligent on many topics. ...

I shared that both of the October 1928 issues of Successful Farming and Farm Journal magazines had ads enticing U.S. farmers into moving to Canada for better land, prices and opportunity and so on. How did that work out for those who took the bait? I can only assume not so well after the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. ...

The May 1927 issue of Farm Journal claimed to have 1.4 million subscribers making its readership larger than Successful Farming magazine's. It was smaller than SF magazine at only 74 pages. Farm Journal claimed to have been publishing for 57 years in 1927. ...

I have been fascinated by moments in history when something material took place of note that for whatever reason, disappeared so that almost no one today is cognoscente that it had existed. Few people have ever heard of a Winchester Store. They know of Winchester guns and ammo but in the 1920s Winchester built and operated a franchise hardware store system that reached 6,400 hardware stores before they filed bankruptcy in January 1930, a commercial failure of the Great Depression...

I am bullish. Those are three words that I enjoy. I turned bullish corn last May when I told you to "load the boat" but was cautions yet over turning bullish commodities in general because of a cycle low that was due in commodities this fall. I think that low has been set and that we will see gains in commodity prices into 2020. ...

President Donald Trump is airing campaign TV ads here in Iowa where the punch line is that he sells himself as "The Tough Guy." No doubt about it ... he has a look (scowl), a swagger, a mouth and a bad attitude where he will go to any length or depth to take on anybody he sees as a challenge, denigrating them in the meanest terms. ...

Staff Sgt. Clinton Romesha won the Medal of Honor for his combat in Afghanistan in 2009 for "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.” He has written the book "Red Platoon" to explain what happened to his unit there and he was our guest for a public speaking event at the Clay County Fair recently. I had the honor spending some time with him and interviewing him there...

Everyone that comes out of a meeting with President Donald Trump thinks that they had a "great" meeting and that he is on their side. He is the greatest BSer and is best at misleading folks that he is their ally when the only side he is ever really on is his own political self-interest...

U.S. agriculture is one of the most immigrant dependent industries in the U.S. for its labor force. Immigrants have historically been the labor engine for agriculture over the history of the nation regardless whether the servitude was involuntary or voluntary over that time. Only the ethnic groups and race of immigrants providing that labor force has changed. Today it is dominantly Hispanic with some Eastern European, African and Asian contribution. They tend not to be white...

What are you going to plant next year ... that is profitable? President Donald Trump's trade war has destroyed the soybean and cotton markets. Wheat is no better. Those that planted soybeans this year out of a desire to maintain crop rotations will be maintaining the burdensome carryover at considerable expense and if they continue to plant soybeans in 2020 the carryover will get worse. ...

When President Donald Trump thinks that he can order U.S. companies to leave their businesses in China, that is not free enterprise capitalism ... it is fascism. That is the kind of government interference and autocratic dictatorship of commercial activity that has only been practiced throughout history by fascist regimes. ...

What do Canadians think of Americans? They will not say that one of their traits is to be extremely polite. If they have nothing good to say, they remain quiet. They do note that they often hear of Americans saying that they would like to move to Canada. ...

Who is President Donald Trump going to blame a recession on? According to Fortune Magazine, the length of the current economic expansion has been record-breaking, lasting 121 months from June 2009 through July 2019 surpassing the second longest expansion of 120 months from March 1991 to March 2001. The reason was Trump's tax cut coming late in the business cycle which gave the economy another boost just as the recovery was tiring...

CBSN interviewed a Nebraska farmer who gave them the quote ... "I'm not a climate change guy, but. ...” That quote could be finished more than one way: "But for the weather we have been having." "But for what I have seen in my lifetime." "But for the frequency of crop insurance claims increasing." "But for the bomb cyclone." "But for the fact I am a Republican." Or "But for the fact I would get razed at the coffee shop if I admitted to believing in climate change."...

You start with some assumptions and compare them to what you know. There have been three lawsuits in which California juries have awarded damages to plaintiffs whose lawyers have successfully argued that their clients contracted cancer from contact with Roundup/glyphosate herbicide. ...

Every day I do a 40-minute commute through Clay and Dickinson counties in Iowa and besides the uneven crops this year what sticks out that is most apparent is the pristine weed control. Weeds are universally absent in the corn and soybean fields that look picture perfect creating the appearance that everyone is a great farmer here. There are a few milk-weeds in the ditches for the monarch butterflies but the ditches are clean of weeds too...

The reason that I am sharing my history of Roundup and life on the farm is that I and several family members and CommStock clients and friends participated in the filming of a documentary on the safety of Roundup/glyphosate. A documentary producer from California, Ariana Victor, and a three-man film crew spent most of a weekend here filming discussions between farmers, seed dealers, a farm manager, health care practitioner, a water quality specialist and Corn Growers board member on the topic of Roundup, safety and what its use means to the agriculture sector.. ...

Part 1 of a Series I was born in 1952 in Spencer, Iowa and my life on the farm near Royal, Iowa started before the Green Revolution. I went to college at SDSU in 1970 studying Agronomy and read how we were on the cusp of a worldwide famine due to a population explosion and that Agriculture as we knew it would be helpless to increase productivity enough to avoid it. ...

I see two things that President Donald Trump is really inflamed over that are obviously of extreme importance to him. One is the Federal Reserve increase in interest rates slowing his economic parade of growth. He is adamant in turning that around and jawboning the Fed into reducing interest rates to further support his strong economy. He realizes that his trade war weighs on the U.S. economy even though he says the opposite. He needs lower interest rates to offset that...

I will give it to President Donald Trump that he understands economic stimulus. There are essentially three kinds of economic stimulus: fiscal stimulus, regulatory stimulus and monetary policy. His tax cut was, of course, the fiscal kind. On the regulatory front, perception is as strong as reality and Trump oozes the perception that he cuts red tape. ...

Farmers are making the national news now ... in some good ways and some bad depending on perspective. The scope and magnitude of this spring wet weather event is starting to be understood by more people. Farmers are beginning to figure out that this was more than your garden variety regional planting delay and that it encompassed the entire U.S. Corn Belt and surrounding fringe areas. Words like "historical" and "unprecedented" should be used...

I went on eBay.com and bought a new USS John McCain baseball cap. I plan to wear it to honor John McCain who was a naval pilot shot down in Vietnam, captured there as a prisoner of war, who is a war hero, later becoming a profile in courage as a U.S. ...

There are a lot of people, businesses and entities that were pretty shaken up over President Donald Trump's plan to intimidate and essentially extort Mexico into shutting off our border to refugees coming from Central America. The U.S. and Mexican state departments met to discuss what Mexico had to do in order to make this new tariff threat go away, allegedly coming up with a plan that Trump claims has not all been made public. ...

There is a joke that goes something like: “The stock market is crashing on the announcement by NASA that an extinction size asteroid had been tracked on a collision course with the earth in a few days, but rebounded 400 points late session on a 25% increase in Apple earnings.” That is not a lot different than how the market traded recently on news that the trade war with China was being ramped up with more tariffs. ...

"It's the economy stupid" was the mantra for the Bill Clinton campaign to get him reelected to a second term as president, despite his many flaws. Donald Trump will modify that argument for his reelection slightly to, "Given the best economy in the history of the U.S. ...

I got this letter as an equity-holder from Little Sioux Corn Processors ethanol company: "Dear Owner, For the first time in 20 years — 20 years!!! — in 2018 ethanol use in the U.S. went down. And it went down as a direct result of small refinery exemptions from the RFS granted by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. ...

President Donald Trump does not want inflation or higher commodity prices. Those things bother the Federal Reserve and cause them to tighten monetary policy, increasing interest rates and we know how he feels about that. He has been doing a very good job of holding commodity prices down as every time the price of oil recovers, he jawbones it back lower again. ...

It was 2015, when Eric Branstad, Gov. Terry Branstad's son, was head of America's Renewable Future, a pro-ethanol group that lobbied candidates running for the nomination for president in Iowa. Trump wanted to win the Iowa caucuses and knew that Terry Branstad was a strong ethanol supporter. ...

I have been surprised at how many times that Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley's name comes up in my report. He is very much engaged in the legislative and political process in Washington. He is the president of the Senate and chairman of the Finance Committee which gives him much power in Congress. ...

President Donald Trump uses vinegar to get what he wants but rarely any sugar. He is more inclined to use a sledgehammer to beat what he wants from whom he wants it from, and then if they resist, he beats them again. That is why agriculture and ethanol groups are afraid to challenge Trump in spite of his having the most damaging RFS and trade policy for the agriculture sector in modern history. ...

One characteristic of the Donald Trump presidency has been the challenge of American institutions in some of the most heretofore bedrock ways that they operate. I am not a guardian of the status quo when they find something better, but that is not what has been challenged. ...

Percentages can be misleading. Talk of 500 farm bankruptcies, a 90% increase from last year, attracted attention but there were over 11 times that many annually during the worst of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. It wouldn't sound so bad if they said that farm bankruptcies in 2018 were just 8.6% of 1987 levels. ...

I was told by a director of the Iowa Corn Growers that at a meeting they discussed my recent reports where I had noted that the National Corn Growers Association is dropping the ball in pushing back against President Donald Trump personally on renewable identification number waivers. ...

I heard an interview with New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio where, referring to wealth disparity in the U.S., he said “There was plenty of money ... It was just in the wrong hands." That is a pretty categorically strong statement that if you have wealth somehow you hadn't earned it, and it was wrong you had it while others did not. That is a profound statement of socialism...

The U.S. Commerce Department says that the economy grew by 2.9 percent last quarter and 2.6 percent for last year. President Donald Trump was disappointed. Anything less than 3 percent "was not his fault." He set the economy up for faster growth with a tax cut as fiscal stimulus and then the Fed pushed on the brakes with higher interest rates countering the fiscal stimulus with monetary policy. ...

Billionaire Warren Buffet never got excited about farmland investment but his son Howard did. I think that Howard Buffet liked being called a farmer after writing the book "Forty Chances Finding Hope in a Hungry World." He was a bit off though or I am above average. He was referring to most farmers who grow crops for 40 seasons in their lives. 2019 will be my 46th crop and I had just as well go for an even 50...

One revelation highlighted by the recent government shutdown is just how many Americans are on the edge of being broke. Many get paid every other week because they need to be paid that often and if they miss one or two paychecks they have no money. They have no savings, they have no credit line, they have no banker to talk to, their parents may be just as tight on cash, they probably can't even get one of those high interest payday loans with no paycheck as collateral. ...

Part 2 of 2 Farmers do not want to hear that they may have to endure a few more years of tight margins before corn prices break out of the current trading range marked near 4.50 at the top of the range to become more profitable again. The 29-year corn price cycle suggests that a new base equilibrium period that can take a decade to form is required before supply and demand adjust to one another to become the next bull market in corn...

The chart that I have included in my annual outlook presentation longer than I can remember is the Purdue University 29-year corn price cycle. The corn price cycle starts with a base equilibrium lasting about a decade, followed by a launch when prices respond positively to having built a demand base, and then a spike higher when a drought or some other fundamental exacerbates supply and demand tightness stetting the price high for the cycle. ...

My wife, Jane, has gotten me to occasionally watch the HGTV shows "Fixer Upper" with Chip and Joanna Gaines and the "Property Brothers" with Drew and Jonathan Scott. What fascinates me about those shows is the lack of imagination that people have who cannot picture something that is not explicitly in front of them. ...

Is the economy real? President Donald Trump describes it in historical terms as the greatest economy that the country has ever experienced and then takes the credit of course. There are good numbers on the employment front, both high employment and growing wages. The tax cut is a windfall to those making money. Sure wish that we (farmers) could put it to better use...

Growing up in Iowa, I was relatively unexposed to the regional cultural differences of this great country. There was no racial diversity in Royal 50 years ago when I was a young man with a total white population here, mostly Danes and Germans. Everything we learned about race relations we saw on TV or experienced only by traveling to other regions of the country. ...

U.S. Rep. Steve King got more infamous while I was gone on vacation. He was one of the dominant story lines for a couple of national news cycle. It was his racist white supremacist comments that continued to bring the heat. He is the product of the openness that I believe was encouraged by Donald Trump for racist white supremacists to come out of the closet, making their views public. ...

Over the Christmas holiday I watched Smirnoff vodka television commercials touting a new non-GMO label for its vodka. First off, Smirnoff is Russian vodka and Russians are drunks and lying S*!s. Smirnoff vodka was developed by Vladimir Smirnoff after escaping Russia after the October Revolution. Vodka nearly destroyed Russia and maybe still will. Smirnoff vodka is actually owned and distributed today by a British company but that conflicts with my narrative. It is still Russian...

From a subscriber: "I asked my local Cenex manager why the price of E85 was still high. E10 has dropped 43 cents in the last couple of months and E85 hasn't changed from $1.94. He told me that the RIN price has often been close to 60 cents but now is only 9 cents. ...

Time may be running out for both sides in trade talks between the U.S. and China. The Chinese economy is weakening and there are many bubble aspects to it that Beijing is aggressively trying to manage so they do not burst. What they are doing is attempting a soft landing from what has been a historic period of really unprecedented economic growth in that country impacting the world. ...

How can I say this without sounding too "liberal?” Santa Claus is sexist. I know because I have done my research on the subject. Last year I gave my wife a really sharp Santa Claus statue for Christmas. She loves Christmas decor and a local store had a first-class Santa Claus that stood about 2 feet tall. ...

Agriculture input suppliers are worried about the sour mood that many farmers have regarding the outlook. That makes them more reluctant to open their pocket books and spend. Commodity market outlook meetings can be a rather dismal exercise that can cause some long faces. I like to add some humor to it as a saving grace which is why I have a couple good slides in my outlook presentation that give rise to a few chuckles. It may be a slog but we will get through this...

What was officially known as the Fourth National Climate Assessment report, which is a multi-federal agency congressionally mandated report, was released last Friday. It elicited a broad varied response, much of which was predictable. It in general supported the premise of there being a human contribution to climate change and offered that an aggressive response is needed in order to mitigate the risks. The president's response to the warning was "I don't see it.”...