Anyone involved in agriculture should take special heed of the comments by Barack Obama made in a recent TIME magazine article.

In the article, as reported by the Associated Press, the Democratic nominee for president said U.S. agriculture was more polluting than the transportation sector. He also said U.S. agriculture was “partly responsible for the explosion in our health care costs because they’re contributing to Type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all that things that are driving our huge explosion in health care costs.”

Obama was citing the writings of Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at the University of California-Berkeley.

A press conference called by the McCain-Palin campaign on Saturday seized on the issue, and rightly so. At the press conference, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Charlie Kruse, a fourth-generation Missouri farmer, criticized what they called “Obama's attack on American farmers.”

Charlie Kruse added, "If Senator Obama is taking policy hints from professors at California-Berkeley, he's got a fundamental lack of understanding of agriculture in the U.S. If his programs get implemented, it would increase malnutrition and poverty around the world.”

Once again Obama demonstrates the chancy proposition that a person with no practical experience in anything but running for office presents. Such a person must become a sponge for ideas and concepts from those around him, and sadly this episode again exhibits how Obama tends to ally himself with the more radical and leftist elements of U.S. society, as evidenced by his associations with race baiters like Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, the unrepentant ’60s terrorist William Ayers, and others.