On this page are links to articles about farms, farmers, and farming from feed grains to forestry, about the strip-mining and reclamation of prime farmlands, about polluted runoff from farm fields, about agribusiness and federal ag policy, and about the farm economy and rural Illinois.

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I came from farm people, that is, people who farmed or sold machines to farmers or lent money to farmers or bought and sold the things farmers made. I grew up in in a state in which city folks are as perfectly surrounded by farms as Hebrideans are by water. The first two pieces I sold to national magazines were about farming and farmers, and I've continued to write about both.

 

While I was busy at my keyboard for 40 years, the family farmer became the agribusinessman, the grain-and-hog farm became an outdoor factory, and agriculture completed its evolution from growing food for people to producing feedstocks for industry—much to lament, in short, but more happily for the journalist, much to write about too. My pieces gradually became more critical and my prose more pointed but that had no effect on public debate whatsoever. Farming still enjoys a privileged place in Illinois culture and politics that I think the industry is less and less entitled to. 

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Interested readers also should know that I devoted a chapter in my history of mid-Illinois—“Wondorous plant”—to agriculture as it affected that part of the state; see Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves.