-
Commentary: Congress Needs to Codify Farmers’ Right-to-Repair
Agriculture probably isn’t the first industry that comes to mind when thinking of the latest technology, but farmers and ranchers rely on machines dependent on the latest technology. “Farm equipment can’t be repaired with the turn of a wrench or a piece of bailing wire anymore,” the American Farm Bureau (AFB) says. Instead, most…
-
Commentary: Bourbon country voted for the trade war. Now it is paying for it.
The White House tariffed Canadian whisky at 50 percent because Canada stopped buying bourbon. Canada was about to put the bourbon back. The deal collapsed anyway — and the counties that make the whiskey backed Trump by 70 percent and more.
-
Commentary: As Farm Bill Stalls, New Legislation Emerges Tackling Unfair Markets in Agriculture
Last week, the Senate Agriculture Committee failed to approve a new Farm Bill. The new bill is now three years overdue and effectively paralyzed, even as farmers face rising costs, growing debt, climate disruptions and market losses. Cutting through the Farm Bill quagmire are a series of exciting new bills that directly address excess…
-
Analysis: The Democratic Party’s civil war is on Lexington’s ballot — and you can vote for both sides
Herbert Lynn is a democratic socialist and DSA member running on public power, tenant unions and a data-center ban, funded by $47 average gifts. Dan Wu is a founding member of the billionaire-backed Abundance Elected network, funded at $253 a gift. The national Democratic civil war has arrived on Lexington’s at-large ballot — where…
-
Commentary: Will the Real USDA Reorganization Plan Please Stand Up?
Last year, 2025, was the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) affordable rural housing programs. If a spring 2025 plan to reorganize the entire Department is implemented, those and many other USDA programs would be sharply reduced or eliminated. But is that plan – USDA’s Agency Reduction in Force and Reorganization…
-
Commentary: The sentence Dan Wu never finished
The vice mayor’s re-election website deleted the word “activist,” the Civil Rights plank, and the Environment plank, demoted housing from a promise to a noun — and replaced them with a pledge to avoid drama. The record says the website is the honest one.
-
The Track on Race Street: how Lexington buried the course that made it the Horse Capital — and built Keeneland on the grief
For 107 years Lexington’s thoroughbreds ran at the Kentucky Association course on Race Street — the ground that launched Isaac Murphy and gave America its oldest stakes race. Then the Depression killed it, a housing project rose on its grave, and a handful of horsemen gambled everything on a non-profit called Keeneland.
-
“Transparency Is a Choice”: how the Fayette school board dismissed its public, step by step, on the way to a million-dollar exit
On the night Fayette’s school board locked in four more years of Demetrus Liggins, a board member lectured skeptical parents that “sometimes transparency is a choice.” Eighteen months of receipts later, we know whose choice it was.
-
The Line: houses, horses, and the money behind Lexington’s growth boundary
Lexington’s single biggest source of local political money is a horse farm. Its growth boundary — the nation’s first, drawn in 1958 — is what that money is defending. A documented, bilateral look at the homebuilders and the horse farms fighting over where to draw the line, traced dollar by dollar through the campaign-finance…
-
Let It Flood: how a drowned Lexington street became Kentucky’s biggest food forest
The same low ground along Wolf Run that flooded out Kilrush Drive in June 1992 was bought up, demolished and left as a mowed city greenway for fifteen years — until a permaculturist asked to plant it. How a drowned Lexington street became Kentucky’s biggest food forest.