By Jim Van Der Pol Kerkhoven, Minnesota — There is a trendy new “Foodie” culture, of which we are a part. We sell into it. We also never gave up cooking in our house. The Foodies often point out a generational difference in this way: Your mother or grandmother, they say, might ask you after [...]

By Jim Van Der Pol Kerkhoven, Minnesota — One pattern sometimes holds true in several different venues. That is true now of doctoring and farming, both of which are in a pretty advanced state of decay. Thoughtful people in both these areas are wondering how long the current practices and ideas can hold up. Bruce [...]

By Joel McNair, Belleville, Wisconsin —For a few years now — basically since his retirement from Purdue University — plant pathologist Don Huber has been telling people that there are serious problems with glyphosate (Roundup). To date most of the discussion has taken place within the world of soybeans. Based on two decades of his [...]

By Jim Van Der Pol, Kerkhoven, Minnesota — The telemarketer who was trying to convince me that I could “earn” a 90% return to a play on the stock market was surprised to hear that I didn’t deal with criminals. He was so surprised to hear this that he hung on long enough to hear [...]

By Joel McNair, Belleville, Wisconsin — Talk of $200 per barrel crude oil and seven-dollar per gallon gasoline grabs headlines and earns sound bites, and indeed these things may be reality sooner rather than later. Or they may not. History and common sense tell us the current oil price trend line will not continue unabated. [...]

By Jim Van Der Pol, Kerkhoven, Minnesota — This is the fifth and final column of a series on my thoughts on the impacts our farms and businesses may have upon our families, the communities in which they are located, and ultimately upon the world at large. I started with an illustration of a deflected [...]

By Jim Van Der Pol, Kerkhoven, Minnesota — Joel has challenged me to begin to think and write about a better and more satisfying life on our farms and in our rural communities. So this and several columns to follow will assume that we all pretty much know the problems, that we as farmers, graziers [...]

By Jim Van Der Pol, Kerkhoven, Minnesota — I have been thinking about the poster the Kerkhoven blacksmith had hanging on the wall a half century ago, when I would follow Dad everywhere. This was in the mid-’50s, when blacksmiths were still called that, in part because they were not at that time so very [...]

By Jim Van Der Pol, Kerkhoven, Minnesota — We are not doing so well with our boys. I know this because I used to be one. Statistics says that boys are twice as likely as girls to suffer and die from physical abuse. They are four times as likely as girls to commit suicide. Learning [...]

By David Kline, Fredricksburg, Ohio — The past week I have been mulling 1874 sketches of two farms in Sangamon County, Illinois. Maurice Telleen, founder and editor emeritus of Draft Horse Journal, sent them to me along with these words, “When I bought these two prints last April in Springfield, Illinois, my thought at the [...]