Stories

With Iowa’s Tom Harkin taking up the late Ted Kennedy’s HELP Committee chairmanship in the U.S. Senate, an Arkansas lawmaker is taking the gavel of the Agriculture Committee. But Iowa’s two U.S. senators say that despite the shift, Iowa’s farming interests should remain well represented in the nation’s capital.

Politicians don’t usually get noticed for what they write in the Farm Bureau’s semimonthly newsletter, but some of their responses to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s candidate survey might be news to you. Sen. John McCain said he would exempt agriculture from his carbon cap-and-trade program. Sen. Barack Obama said he supported a [...]

Implementation of the new farm bill will ultimately be handed off to the next presidential administration, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said at a press conference in Iowa Thursday.

Schafer told agriculture reporters at the 2008 Farm Progress Show that the implementation of the new farm bill is “going well,” with the work about two weeks ahead of schedule.

An editor of The Rural Blog, a University of Kentucky professor with close ties to community newspapers in U.S. farm country, says Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s positioning on farm issues could provide a major opening for his likely Democratic opponent, Barack Obama.

“What was going on was mortgage closings just the same as going on today …”
Seventy-five years ago, corn was fetching less than 10 cents a bushel and pork was at three cents a pound. A migrant class of American workers was being created. These were the desperate times of the 1930s known as the Great [...]

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, called on congressional leadership Wednesday to step in and resolve the disputes that have stalled the progress of the farm bill.

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said today that he would also chair the conference committee on the 2007 farm bill.
This places the veteran Iowa senator in a pivotal position for ironing out differences between House and Senate ag bills.
"That does have a nice important aspect to it, if you [...]