When Iowa’s Republican Senator Joni Ernst and Democratic challenger Theresa Greenfield met for their second debate last week, one agriculture question stole the show. Greenfield was asked the break-even price for a bushel of corn for an Iowa farmer, and she nailed it to the penny. But when Ernst was asked the break-even price for soybeans, she had no idea. In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Art Cullen, editor of Iowa’s The Storm Lake Times, argues that debates are more than just political theater: They can have consequences. And, he says, the soybean moment proves it. “The price of soybeans isn’t just a number to know; it sits at the center of a knotty farm-belt fiasco,” writes Cullen. The public would likely never know Ernst’s blind spot were she to have declined the debate, like our current president recently did.
Grist, an award-winning, nonprofit media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices,…
Every year, California dairy farms emit hundreds of thousands of tons of the potent greenhouse…
Highway 7 runs north-south through western Washington, carving its way through a landscape sparsely dotted…
One of the greatest pleasures I had as a child growing up in the Chicago…
Undocumented immigrants experience food insecurity at much higher rates than other populations, yet they are…
Writer Charlotte Druckman and editor Rebecca Flint Marx are both Jewish journalists living in New…