Articles by Jim Webster

Negotiations are underway to sell The National Grange's 11-story building, which is located only a block from the White House, continuing the trend for many farm groups that have gotten out of owning real estate.

Former Senate Republican Leader and presidential candidate Bob Dole, who forged a legislative record in food and agriculture and the rights of the disabled, died Sunday. He was 98.

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln will celebrate a new biography “Rhymes with Fighter: Clayton Yeutter, American Statesman,” of former U.S. Trade Representative and Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter with a November 4 book launch.

C.W. (Bill) McMillan, a long-time lobbyist and consultant for the U.S. beef cattle industry and briefly an Agriculture Department assistant secretary, died Wednesday of heart failure. He was 95.

Roman Leshchenko, Ukraine’s minister of agrarian policy and food, has a vision of creating a global agricultural powerhouse with the initiation of a new land reform program to create a private farmland market and modernization of its Soviet-era irrigation system.

Richard Rominger, deputy secretary of agriculture during the Clinton administration and former secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, died Sunday of a heart attack suffered at a restaurant in Winters, Calif., his home town. He was 93.

Kailee Tkacz Buller is leaving USDA, Gary Woodward has taken a job off Capitol Hill, and a familar PR farm hand calls it a career.

A pair of lobbyists advocating for farm and food workers have received waivers that will allow them to serve on the Biden-Harris transition team.

Steven L. Kopperud, former journalist and lobbyist who created a platform for livestock and poultry industries to resist “animal rights” and vegetarian critics, died October 19 in Minneapolis of “a sudden and highly unexpected arrhythmia.”

John A. Schnittker, under secretary of agriculture under former President Lyndon B. Johnson and later an influential Washington farm policy consultant, died September 13 at his home near Santa Ynez, California, of heart failure. He was 95.