No impact of Russia’s invasion will compare to the immediate toll the conflict is taking on people’s lives in Ukraine. But economic disruption also affects people’s daily lives, and it is worth noting how important agriculture is to Ukraine’s economy. Corn and wheat are not only among its top exports; the country ships out a high amount of what it grows.

Long, long ago, in 1921 – pre-dating even Betty White – Congress enacted the Packers and Stockyards Act in response to a small handful of companies dominating the U.S. meatpacking trade. It designed the law to protect farmers and livestock producers, who had much less power in the domestic supply chain relationship, from being taken advantage of and to see that they would be paid fairly based on animal weight. This came about three decades after the feds first began investigating meatpackers for colluding to fix beef prices to consumers.

Did you know the taxpayer funding which helps tens of millions of lower-income residents buy groceries falls under the farm bill? This probably sounds more like a Health and Human Services item, but 76% of the spending in the 2018 farm bill was earmarked for nutrition assistance. This wasn’t a big departure from previous farm bills – according to the Congressional Research Service, the 2014 version allocated about 80% and in 2008, it was 67%.

The state of polluted waterways a half-century ago was kind of a trash fire. Literally – news stories from the late 1960s detail the horror of fires igniting on various U.S. rivers from a combination of spilled or discarded petroleum and debris in the water. The Cuyahoga in Cleveland is likely the most recognized, but there were others around the same time, including the Buffalo River in New York and the Rouge River in Detroit. Concern about water pollution was one of the tentpoles of the environmental movement that finally led to Congress creating the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970.

In 2008, 14 years after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, the U.S. market opened fully to duty-free Mexican sugar imports; that same year, U.S. fructose – chiefly high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) – flowing to Mexico jumped by 54 percent. Two years later, exports more than doubled again and have fluctuated up and down within about 13 percent of that since, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

“The accelerated pace of climate change and the intensity of projected climate change represent new and unprecedented challenges to the sustainability of U.S. agriculture,” the report notes, adding while farmers can adapt, any economic hardship is likely to hit smaller-scale producers harder because they have less capital and credit access than larger operations.

Tony Stark and his alter ego are fictional. But, as the hit of the summer box office, they may be a real boon of sorts for the welding industry – at least that’s the hope of the American Welding Society (AWS), which is taking advantage of “Iron Man’s” popularity to reach out to young people at whom it is targeted.

Following the closing credits for the movie “Moola,” there’s a special thank-you to Omniglow LLC, crediting the company for its help – without which the independent comedic film would never have been inspired or made.