Author: Gregory Rehmke
Tapping Water Rights for California Agriculture
Agriculture in California uses a lot of water and also helps produces a lot of value. For 2025, California farmers earned $65 billion in cash receipts (California Dept. of Food and Agriculture, 2025): California’s...
Ronald Reagan/Leonard Read Aff. Case: Push the Button! Updated for agriculture & health insurance
Should debaters call for Congress to “push the button” and end federal agriculture programs (Stoa topic)? Or to end federal health insurance programs (UIL/NSDA topic)? Or maybe end SNAP, at the intersection of agriculture...
Federal Health/Insurance Interventions Distort Care and Increase Costs
Notes on Health Insurance: Economic Principles and Metabolic Science Gregory Rehmke (NSDA/UIL Substack post) NSDA and UIL debaters can find myriad books, articles, and videos offering policy reforms for the federal health insurance topic....
Adventures in Terraforming: Going Green with Turtles, Beavers, Buffalo, Elk, and Cattle
Animals can convert Earth’s “moonscapes” into rich green ecosystems. Past societies reshaped their environment with burning, damming streams and rivers, irrigating, as well as hunting and gathering, herding animals, agriculture. and aquaculture. Long before...
One Country Did End Farm Subsidies
For debaters looking to reform federal agriculture polices, consider a successful reform overseas… AI Overview from the land that ended federal farming subsidies and regulations: New Zealand’s agricultural sector is driven by innovative entrepreneurs...
Food, Farming, Politics, and Economics
Ideally food and farming wouldn’t be political. Decisions about how food should be grown or raised, processed, and provided wouldn’t be left for politicians and citizens to cast votes. As consumers, decisions about how...
The Hidden Half of Health and Agriculture
For the Stoa agriculture debate topic, and for the NSDA (public school) health insurance topic, understanding the Hidden Half of Nature is key. The invisible half of nature are the microbes underground, underwater, and...
Welfare for Farmers Creates Dependency
Critics of welfare for the poor argue that too much “helping” creates dependency. Books like When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself explain that poverty...
Time to Sunset Federal Farm Programs
Federal agriculture subsidies, taxes, and regulations confuse and distort farming and ranching across the country. This 2021 article in The New Republic Abolish the Department of Agriculture is subtitled: The USDA has become an...