Opinion

GUEST COLUMN, Jackie Mundt, Kansas Farm Bureau

The agriculture industry is a small world. It doesn’t always feel that way when you’re in the middle of wheat harvest or out checking calves on a quiet evening, but time and again, I am reminded of how tightly connected this industry really is.

One of those reminders came this summer. There was a week in July when it seemed like everyone in agriculture was in Washington, D.C. I was supposed to be there, too, but storms on the East Coast canceled my original flight. While enjoying the airline’s customer service hold music, I started scrolling through Facebook and noticed how many people in my network were posting about being in D.C. for the week. It seemed like lots of organizations in agriculture had meetings or fly-ins that week.

GUEST COLUMN, J. Basil Dannebohm

Earlier this summer I wrote a piece entitled, “We are in dangerous, uncharted waters. Goodnight, and good luck." (Available to revisit at www.dannebohm.com.) It addressed the Los Angeles ICE raids and the military deployment in response to the ensuing protests.

I cautioned that the language used by the Trump administration, specifically the use of the words: "insurrection," "invasion," "obstructing," and "abdicated," combined with the overall tone and approach toward the situation, was not coincidental. Rather, it suggested the regime was laying groundwork to justify and declare martial law.

L&T Publisher Earl Watt

The Kansas Senate was a raucous chamber in January when the debate opened up about one of the top issues on the minds of Kansans — property taxes.

While Senate Tax Committee Chair Caryn Tyson didn’t think it was the right time to discuss the issue, she said her chamber and the people of Kansas had made a push that made it impossible to ignore.

Instead, the Kansas Legislature calmed the storm of Kansans concerned about both valuation and mill levy increases despite a proposed 3 percent valuation cap form one year to the next being proposed.

THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

Yesterday, I saw a bunch of cousins.

I have a lot of cousins. A few have died by now, but I started out with 36 cousins, and only two were on my father’s side.

My mother came from a large farm family, and her brothers and sisters had a lot of children, and so I got to have a lot of cousins while I was growing up. I thought it was normal, having this second layer of siblings that I would see up at the farm. We ate sitting on the stairs, because there were many more people than chairs. We picked eggs and played in the haymow together.