Faceless Bureaucrat

Congratulations to NRCS

2012-02-03T13:38:00.000-05:00

NRCS has made their soil survey info available on mobile devices. What's not clear to me is whether they're using the GPS info available in some such devices to automatically pull up the soil profile you're standing on. I suspect they aren't, but it's the obvious next step.

How People Get Smarter Over Time

2012-02-03T13:34:00.001-05:00

From Ajah Shah's blog, a post on changes in the computer world:

In the 1980s, software came with fat manuals. Users actually sat down in training classes. A remarkable feature of the new world is how the manuals and training are gone. Software is incredibly capable but there are no manuals. Google maps or Amazon or Apple Mail are very powerful programs, but the fundamental assumption is that a reasonable person can just start tinkering with them and learn more as he goes.

The modern office worker gets no formal training in software all his life. The modern knowledge worker learns major tools (e.g. a programming language) and often puts in enormous effort for these. But for the rest, the ordinary flow of day to day life, where new software systems come up all the time, is done without formal training.

One of the puzzles of life is the Flynn effect, which says every generation is smarter than the previous one. Personally I think we drastically underestimate the effect of the learning which floats in the environment, which Mr. Shah's observation implies.

SSA a Model for Online Operations at FSA

2012-02-02T11:22:00.002-05:00

Social Security Administration wanted to have 44 percent of retirees sign up for SS payments online. That was their announced goal:

The actual percentage who filed online was 41 percent, states the SSA Performance & Accountability Report for Fiscal Year 2011.

I applaud SSA for setting the goal and announcing it, even more for the followup report. If and when USDA aims to have farmers to do more stuff online with FSA, I'd like to see USDA specify what the goals are and what the results are.

7000 Pounds of Milk

2012-02-01T13:38:00.002-05:00

Post has an article on a Virginia farmer selling Holstein bulls to Russia. Two paragraphs:

Russian farmers are trying to improve dairy herds that produce an average 7,000 pounds of milk per cow each year, said Valery Osipenko, who co-owns Vistar Farms of Mechanicsville, which sold the bulls to Russian farmers for an undisclosed amount. Top-quality American Holsteins produce an average of more than 20,000 pounds of milk per year.

Instead of raising dairy cattle for milk and beef cattle for meat, Soviet collective farms had “dual-use” cattle, which would be milked for a while, then killed for meat, Osipenko said. Those one-size-fits-all cattle may have embodied an egalitarian ideal, but both milk and meat were mediocre, said Osipenko, a native of Ukraine who recalled his mother boiling beef for hours in a fruitless attempt to tenderize it.

Random thoughts: back in the 50's, we were averaging something over 10,000 lbs, maybe more, so Russia is really backwards.

Of course, back in the 1700's dual purpose cattle were the rule in America. I wonder about the evolution of the industry. In the 50's we had "registered" Holsteins, tracking the ancestry of our cows. Used artificial insemination and choose the bull based on the production records of his progeny. Now Darwin writes about how humans have changed domestic breeds by their selection, but I don't recall he used cows as an example. I'm vaguely aware Washington and Jefferson imported animals based on their qualities: is it possible sheep can be "dual-purpose" (wool versus mutton)?

If we assume that US dairymen were, in the 19th century, trying to improve the productivity of their herds, then maybe it's also reasonable to assume the same was true in Russia. So what might have happened? Perhaps the Russian Revolution and the arrival of collective farms meant the freezing of the drive to improve productivity? Meaning for 70 years the Russian dairy industry was frozen?

Still surprising to me that they haven't progressed faster in the 20+ years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Lower Crop Prices in the Future and the Farm Bill

2012-01-31T14:21:00.002-05:00

That's what the CBO is projecting. according to this Bloomberg piece. Corn cash prices down to $4.54? That's not going to help farm bill prospects: some people will worry about lower prices, others (urban) will point to past high prices.

Meanwhile, FSA's friends over at the Farm Bureau are worrying about implementation--from Farm Policy:

“We have serious concerns about the other proposals floating around, which dictate different rules, different crops and different payments. Not only would such programs be a nightmare for local Farm Service Agency offices to administer, but farmers would have the ability to cherry-pick which program works best for them. Because of distortions in price, we’d have a system of farmers deciding what to produce based on government payments rather than market signals.”

Incarceration Rates

2012-01-30T16:48:00.002-05:00

Mr. Coates blogged about drug policy and incarceration today, which caused to me check our history. Incarceration jumped from 338,000 in 1980 to over 2 million by the 2000's, a 6-fold increase.

FSA Office Closings

2012-01-30T16:37:00.000-05:00

I have a Google Alert set up for "FSA". These days as you might expect there's lots of hits on the proposed closures of FSA offices; some are just reporting the proposal, some report meetings held to protest the possibility. Google "USDA FSA closing" to see some of the reports.

There's probably no way to do a "BRAC" commission for these proposals as has been done for closing military bases..

Innovation and the Small

2012-01-29T14:28:00.000-05:00

Innovation often comes from the small, the small business, the individual entrepreneur. But innovation often disadvantages the small, the established small farmer, the small store owner, the small theater.

One example is the change from film to digital in movie theaters, which the Rural Blog posts on here.

It reminds me of when our farm went from horses to a tractor, turned out we needed to invest in other implements, all of which required capital. Those who can't access or accumulate the money can get left behind.

(Having said that, the local Reston theater is under new ownership and is renovating, including all digital projections. We saw "War Horse" there, which has great cinematography, and the experience was great. )

Communitarian Liberalism as Zero Sum

2012-01-29T14:12:00.001-05:00

Ross Douthat in the NYTimes sets up a strawman, communitarian liberalism, on his way to attacking the Obama administration.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

His specific point is the rule providing that health care facilities which offer healthcare insurance must include contraception, etc. among the benefits. This is particularly offensive to those facilities run by the Catholic church.

What he fails to acknowledge in his lead-in are the ways in which the government encourages those "alternative expressions of community". For example, contributions to religious and charitable organizations are tax-deductible; property owned by such organizations is tax-exempt. From my point of view, rather than there being a zero-sum game played between government and NGO's, there's a complex interweaving of interests, sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic, among all the players.

His argument would be more effective if he offered an example of a government monopoly in education, in health care, in welfare. I can't think of one.

Why James Stewart's Production Is Down

2012-01-28T16:29:00.002-05:00

James B. Stewart, the prize winning author, and NYTimes columnist sat down with a calculator to compute his tax rates and reports here. The results:

I paid 24 percent of my adjusted gross income in federal taxes and 37 percent in combined federal, state and local income taxes. I paid 49 percent of my taxable income in federal income tax, and 74 percent of my taxable income in combined federal, state and local income taxes. My totals include federal payroll and self-employment taxes.

No wonder his productivity over recent years has been down--he pays too much in taxes--that's the logic conservative economists would use. His picture reflects his self-employment and living in NYC. I'm too lazy to check but I think the usual figure for comparison is the AGI percentage (i.e., Gingrich paying 30+, Obamas 25+, Romney 14+).

This led me to a thought though: Mr. Stewart may well have slowed down some recently, but is that more the effect of incentives/taxes or is it the effect of aging. Much discussion of the impact of taxes on incentives omits any correction for age.

[updated: corrected typo]

GHWBush Shows Age

2012-01-28T16:21:00.002-05:00

No, George W. Bush's dad isn't greying much, particularly when you realize he was born in 1924, but he is in a wheelchair according to this picture of him and son Jeb with Obama this weekend.

A Base on the Moon

2012-01-27T17:20:00.000-05:00

I bow to no one in my disdain for Mr. Gingrich. But, there's always a but. I do have to admit to just a tad of regard for his pushing the idea of establishing a base on the moon. He's wrong, of course. He pushes the base as a national enterprise, redounding to the glory of the American nation. What the President elected in November should do is make a major push to internationalize space, try to get the Chinese participating, open our efforts up to other nations. Obama, and Gingrich, seem to want to commercialize space, relying mostly on private enterprise. That's well and good, but.

This but is the problem of space junk. Space, near-earth space, is a "commons", and the human race is currently engaged in its destruction. The only way to prevent polluting space is with international governance, plus funding of engineering solutions, a space garbage collector.

Back to Newt. I grew up in the classic age of science fiction: Heinlein, Asimov, Anderson, Clarke, et. al. While I know better now, it's hard to abandon one's childhood, hence my attitude towards Newt and his base on the moon.

Future for FSA Software

2012-01-27T15:23:00.002-05:00

Haven't discussed FSA in relation to the farm bill recently. There's discussion that it will be impossible to pass a new farm bill this year, given the election year politics, the debate over the deficit, etc. That would be good; it'd allow more time for FSA to implement their new software systems. There's also discussion, as here in Farm Policy, about having crop-specific programs, rather that one program which covers what we used to call "the program crops", the major field crops. That's bad. Newly designed programs don't take on their final shape until the last minute, making it very hard to implement software for them (see ACRE), and having to implement 3 or 4 differently shaped programs for different crops further complicates the matter. Add to that the loss of historical memory and expertise from the loss of Washington program experts. End result: "interesting times" ahead.

McDonalds in France

2012-01-27T15:14:00.001-05:00

Via Ezra Klein, here's a study of how McDonalds has succeeded in France so well that it's their second most profitable market (the Klein post says "second biggest" but the study says profitable.

I've linked to Dirk Beauregarde posts in the past, most of which show France as a very centralized country. But the lesson of McDonalds in France seems to be adaptation to local customs and suppliers, in contrast to their centralized and standardized operations in the US. In part it's an attempt to recognize the French enjoy their food, and linger, while the Americans grab and go.

How Good Is FSA's Management?

2012-01-26T13:24:00.000-05:00

Federal Computer Weekly has a piece on a GAO report which analyzed why seven big IT projects were successful.

The most common factor was the involvement of program officials, particularly in ensuring the participation of internal and external stakeholders.
The next most factor was the knowledge and skills of the program officials and the support of senior management.

Are FSA Employees Federal?

2012-01-26T12:47:00.000-05:00

That was my question when I saw this Post item, reporting OPM will survey all federal employees to assess their job satisfaction. Now for some purposes county FSA employees who aren't farm loan officers are considered federal, for some purposes not. I'd hope OPM includes them in this survey, but my guess in the normal course of events they won't.

Being Flexible: Chinese Versus US Versions

2012-01-25T16:23:00.002-05:00

The NY Times had a long article on why Apple manufactures in China, focusing on Steve Jobs demand for the iPhone to have a glass screen rather than plastic.

One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Meanwhile, Google Operating System has a post on how the Gmail logo was designed, including this quote from a book:

Dennis Hwang spent the day before the launch coming up with ideas for a logo and trying to make it work in conjunction with the clown-colored Google brand. (...) Even after four years at Google, I found it astounding that one twenty-something guy was sitting alone at his desk, sipping tea and developing the main branding element for a product to be used by millions of people - the night before it was scheduled to launch.

This fits our long-time image: China excels in throwing masses at a project; America is the home of the individual doer.

Kahneman and Dog Whistles

2012-01-24T17:06:00.001-05:00

Finished reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow recently. Also, there was discussion on blogs I follow about whether Gingrich was using "dog-whistle" language in calling Obama a "food stamp president".

Kahneman's fast thinking is his System 1, which occurs unconsciously as we assess our environment on a second to second basis. It is very capable, but sometimes faulty. System 2 is essentially rational, conscious thought, which we hate to do and takes will power and energy.

An example is the famous optical illusions where two straight lines of equal length are displayed simultaneously, but one looks like this >----< and the other like this <----> . When they're one above the other, the second looks shorter than the first. That's the assessment of System 1. Anyone who has encountered the illusion is capable of pulling from memory the fact that it is an illusion, and the lines are of equal length--that's System 2.

I'm thinking similar effects operate with political language. Some language creates knee jerk reactions with the partisans, it's been devalued. Things like "welfare queens", "socialist", "redneck", "Bible-thumper" all work that way.

Wash Day

2012-01-23T18:28:00.001-05:00

Boston 1775 provides part of a poem on wash day in 18th century Boston:

It’s an evocative slice of life, showing a moment when laundry day meant all the women in a household were busy and little girls weren’t allowed jelly or butter, yet science was about to let people fly:

Syrian USDA Office to Close

2012-01-23T14:22:00.002-05:00

Chris Clayton takes a sardonic approach to the pols, and NASCOE, resisting Vilsack's proposed closure of USDA offices.

See this for NASCOE's position,including a thrust at NRCS (all agencies in a county should be evaluated when talking office closures).

Conflict in the New Farm Bill

2012-01-22T14:37:00.001-05:00

One problem the food movement will face in the new farm bill is the choice between trying to expand the supply of good food (i.e., local and organic) and the present. The more you do that, the lower the prices will be and the harder it will be for existing producers to continue with their current size and business model. In other words, expand the supply and you encourage the growth of "corporate" and "industrial" organic/local agriculture.

Just a thought.

Mobile Offices for USDA?

2012-01-20T15:52:00.003-05:00

Back in the mid-90's, when the Service Center project was under Greg Carnill, one of the proposals coming from RD was to have mobile offices. That was seen as a way to reach out to underserved areas (I think especially heavily Latino areas and reservations where language might be a problem). I thought of that when I saw this piece on VA's mobile Vetcenters.

John W. Boyd's Loan Specialist

2012-01-20T14:50:00.000-05:00

John Boyd is prominently associated with the Pigford lawsuit. I just happened to notice there's a vacancy in Mecklenburg county for a supervisory farm loan specialist. I also found it interesting that the town is Boydton.

Lexis-Nexis Is a Government Innovation

2012-01-19T15:16:00.002-05:00

Who would have thought it? That was my reaction when I read this obit in the Post. Three paragraphs:

Mr. Rubin was a corporate lawyer in New York during the late 1960s when he was asked to give his advice on a new computerized legal research system.

The digital database had begun as a project to catalogue Ohio state laws using Air Force technology [emphasis added] that tracked intelligence reports. Mr. Rubin quickly saw the system’s commercial potential because of its ability to make millions of legal documents easily and quickly available to law firms.

The key was to ensure that the database was simple to use, Mr. Rubin said, because “lawyers can’t type, and only 15 percent can spell.”

Of course, I enjoyed the last paragraph as well.

The Era of Good Feelings on the Hill

2012-01-19T12:50:00.003-05:00

In a previously unreported interview, there was evidence of an era of good feelings on Capitol Hill, or maybe not. Maybe it's like the glimpse of that rare woodpecker in the LA/AR swamps, but at least it's something: a Republican legislator was complimentary of a Democrat:

Debbie [Sen. Stabenow] was an absolute pleasure to work with in attempting to put the hurry-up proposal together for the super committee that never came about, but Senator Stabenow, Chairwoman Stabenow was a pleasure to work with and she demonstrated an intense amount ofintensity over on the senate side to try and move things there, so that’s a positive force.

That's from an interview with Rep. Lucas, chair of House Ag.

Obama, Vilsack, and Kahneman

2012-01-18T15:01:00.001-05:00

"Loss aversion" is part of Daniel Kahneman's thought. As he writes in Thinking: Fast and Slow, the theory is that people mostly prefer choices which minimize the risk of loss as opposed to maximizing the chance of gain. And, more interestingly, we prefer a choice which offers the chance of avoiding a loss, even though it's not rational.

On page 305 he ties that into proposed reorganizations, arguing that any reorganization will cause someone to lose something and, given human preferences for loss aversion, they'll fight a lot harder to avoid the loss than people who may stand to gain by the reorganization will fight to implement it.

We can already see this with Obama's proposal on reorganizing commerce; there's lots of resistance to including the office of the US Trade Representative in the overall reorganization.

The same sort of logic applies to the closing of USDA offices; those adversely affected by the loss will fight hard.

But that leads to a mystery: why was Congress able to reorganize USDA in 1994 by combining part of FmHA with ASCS to make FSA? Maybe part of it was in the splitting of FmHA--those parts which became Rural Development could see themselves as gaining by the reorganization. The old Rural Electrification Administration had long been a target for reformers, but by merging it into RD the old name and the old reputation was lost, at least among those who had only a superficial acquaintance with USDA and the lobbyists behind it could see a gain.

Meanwhile the farm loan part of FmHA might not have had the greatest reputation in the government: GAO had had the loan programs on its list to give close scrutiny to. And I remember my boss showing me a letter someone in Congress had sent to the old FmHA, criticizing their failure to implement some legislative provision in comparison with the speed with which ASCS had implemented other provisions. That was, of course, unfair. FmHA was bound by different constraints than ASCS, and had a different culture. But still the contrast might have undermined support on the Hill for maintaining it as a separate agency.

NY Times Undermines Security

2012-01-18T12:48:00.002-05:00

That's what I took away from their article today on teenagers. Apparently the true token of love today is information, specifically one's password. All very touching, but surely the Times should point out the truth: you shouldn't have just one password, but multiple passwords.

[Update: see this Consumer Reports piece after Zappos.]

War Horse and Agriculture

2012-01-17T17:05:00.000-05:00

Just saw the movie War Horse, a very pretty film. But Steven Spielberg is no farm boy. The first third of the movie is pre-war, when the thoroughbred Joey, the War Horse to-be, is trained both as a riding horse and a plow horse. In order to pay the rent, the father has promised the landlord to plant a field to turnips. Supposedly the field is both virgin and stony, impossible to plow. Sure enough, it's on the side of a hill and the ground is strewn with stones (though it's not clear whether they're weathered from the bed rock, which in Devon would be sedimentary, or glacial, rounded by water).

For dramatic purposes I can understand the decision to plow uphill, it makes the task for Joey more imposing, though it makes no sense from an erosion standpoint. When you see the first furrow plowed, and all subsequent furrows, somehow there's no stones in the soil, just good black soil.

Once the field is plowed, the father, limping from a war wound, starts sowing seed by hand. broadcasting across the furrows (no harrowing recorded). I could almost swear it was oats in the container, but I can't swear to it. Now, through the miracle of Hollywood, all that broadcast seed turned several weeks later into neat rows! of turnips. Unfortunately there's a big storm which somehow seems to uproot all the turnips, ruining the crop and creating another crisis for the family to face. I suppose the torrents could have eroded the dirt between the rows, but that didn't seem to be what happened.

I could go on to criticize the placement of the machine guns, but I won't.

It's a must see, if only for Emily Watson, who's always great.

Learning Self-Reliance in Scotland

2012-01-17T12:20:00.001-05:00

The Stonehead and wife believe in self-reliance, so their sons learn cooking early.

Agriculture Is Solar-Powered

2012-01-16T16:09:00.001-05:00

I have posted on hydroponic lettuce growing. If you believe the advocates of organic agriculture, commercial agriculture is essentially hydroponic, in that the soil is exhausted so the plants are growing using the nutrients supplied by chemical fertilizers. That's an exaggeration, but there's a bit of truth in it. That bit of truth means the salient fact about commercial agriculture is: it's solar-powered.

I wonder if anyone has done the calculation of the energy required to grow the crops we raise in the U.S.? If they have, then you could do a graphic showing the sources of all the energy required to maintain our economy, presumably with solar power being a significant contributor.

Being optimistic about the power of search engines, I tried to answer the question in the previous paragraph, which didn't give an exact answer but did lead to an interesting Harpers article including this:

Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn.

The Done List, Not To-do

2012-01-15T14:22:00.002-05:00

I've probably been doing to-do lists for 60 years, off and on. I get a spasm of will-power, a resolve to do better than I've done in the past, a desire to be better organized: result, a to-do list. I write this because today's paper included a discussion of a new app for maintaining a to-do list. I used to be an early adopter, picking up new technology and new software, but no more. No iPhones or iPads for this geezer, no modern apps.

My obsolescence doesn't make a difference; my to-do lists in the past have always petered out very quickly, like water draining into the sand. The number of jobs on the list was always too long, the life of my resolve was too short, and the result was disillusionment.

Two weeks is no basis to judge, but I just may have found an approach which works better for me: the done list. Unfortunately I can't remember where I saw this suggested, but it's definitely not my idea. What I've done is forget the list of projects, it's not important, I know well enough the things I'd like to get done. The "done list" is simply a log of days and notifications of what I've done. My willpower extends (so far) to spending a little time doing something each day. By recording what I've done I get some reinforcement. It's the same psychology as the advice manuals on how to write: they say write something each day, every day.

7 Feet Ain't What It Used To Be

2012-01-15T13:22:00.001-05:00

Back in the days of my youth, long long ago, the 7-foot high jump was, I believe, a barrier. It represented something like the 4 minute mile, the 16 foot pole vault, the 60 foot shot put. Wikipedia confirms it was a barrier, which was broken in 1956.

But now it's not. Reston's Rashaan Jones, a high school junior, cleared it this week in an invitational meet. Congratulations to him. From the blog post:

Jones is among only seven others in Virginia high school indoor track history to have ever successfully cleared seven feet.

Grand Promises

2012-01-13T15:32:00.001-05:00

Secretary Vilsack said, according to the Des Moines Register: "

“We are updating our computer software, which dates from the 1980s, so that farmers will be able to do much of the application and paperwork from home rather than have to personally visit a USDA field office,” Vilsack said during a stopover in Des Moines on his return from Hawaii, where he had addressed the American Farm Bureau Federation."

By chance this came just as I was reading Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow", and had reached the point where he recounts a story that's appropos. Seems he was on a task force to come up with a textbook in Israel. They'd been working for a while (maybe a year, don't have the book handy), had an outline and a couple chapters drafted. So they were planning on when they'd finish, which they thought would be 2-2 1/2 years. Then Kahneman asked a task force member about his experience and knowledge of other similar efforts. The person asked, who had been in full agreement with the 2 year estimate, said that 40 percent of such efforts had never produced anything, that the rest had taken 7 years to accomplish the result, and that the task force in question was below average (in resources, etc.) compared to the other task forces he knew of.

I.e., bottomline, the task force was not going to achieve its goal timely, and likely wouldn't do it at all.

The members of the task force gulped, and proceeded to ignore the information. The textbook was actually delivered in 8 years, and was never used.

Two points Kahneman made: when the meeting took place, the members were near the peak of their commitment to the effort, and had just tackled some of the big, easy pieces, so they underestimated the drain on the effort from lessening commitment and grim reality.

Ambivalence About Farming

2012-01-12T17:03:00.000-05:00

I wonder if there's any occupation/profession where there's no ambivalence. I felt a little ambivalence when I left the farm. And Bob at Pasture Raised... expresses his ambivalence in his most recent post (after a long absence). There might be more ambivalence among those who didn't grow up on a farm, but came to it later in life, perhaps with some rose-colored glasses.

Immigration and False Facts in NYTimes

2012-01-12T13:44:00.002-05:00

The NY Times has an interesting op-ed article by a professor Dowell Myers, of SoCal, arguing that the immigration problem is over, because birth rates have fallen drastically, so our policies need to change. I'd like to believe him. Unfortunately, his facts are wrong, at least one of them:

Indeed, with millions of people retiring every week [emphasis added], America’s immigrants and their children are crucial to future economic growth: economists forecast labor-force growth to drop below 1 percent later this decade because of retiring baby boomers.

If we have 2 million people retiring each week for 50 weeks, that's 1/3 of the nation retiring in a year. How easy it is to destroy one's credibility.

Surprising Energy Fact--Gas Prices

2012-01-12T13:38:00.001-05:00

From the Des Moines Register, in an article discussing the adverse impact of lower natural gas prices on renewable energy:

"Natural gas prices have dipped from $11.50 per thousand cubic feet in mid-2008 to $2.77 per thousand cubic feet this week on the Chicago Board of Trade."

Lettuce Talk of Locavores

2012-01-11T13:35:00.000-05:00

Post has an article on locally-grown lettuce which I find interesting, mostly because it includes some statistics.

The outfit produces 4,000 heads of leaf lettuce a week, every week, apparently immune to weather variations. There may be additional outputs; it's not particularly clear.

The lettuce in grown in 2 fancy-smancy greenhouses, very high tech with computers and stuff, which cover 12,000 square feet, which is a tad over .25 acre. They're planning to add another greenhouse, some 20,000 square feet, which would bring them up to .75 acre. Although they're greenhouses, consider this quote:

A computer regulates everything: the 43 high-pressure sodium lights and heater that maintain summerlike light and temperature; the shade cloths that come down at night or when it’s too sunny outside; the pH, nutrient balance and flow of the water and the water system; and carbon dioxide emitted into the air to boost growth.

They have 12 part-time employees (retirees and housewives paid over minimum wage, plus 3 relatives of the owner-manager.

The lettuce with roots still attached sells in a clamshell for $5 a pop!!! (I'd assume they're selling to K street lobbyists, not to poor underpaid Feds.) Not clear how much the grower gets.

So, if we assume 5,000 a week for 50 weeks, that is 250,000. Assume $2 to grower is $500,00; assume $4 and it's a million. Assume the equivalent of 6 full-time employees paid $30,000 each is $180,000, leaving $320,00 for operating expenses and profit, or more.

If a population of 1 million uses a head per person per week, then it would take 200 such operations to supply, or 50 acres. So rooftop gardens could indeed supply greens for the city, assuming the residents were very well-paid.

A Win for the Foodies: Hostess Bankruptcy

2012-01-10T12:30:00.002-05:00

Hostess Brands, of Wonder Bread and Twinkies fame, is re-entering bankruptcy. That's a victory for the food movement.

131 FSA County Offices OUt?

2012-01-10T12:04:00.002-05:00

That's from the Des Moines Register.

[Updated--here's the press release,
FSA has almost exactly half the 259 cuts being announced by Vilsack in his speech to Farm Bureau. And here's the fact sheeton the details. I didn't see any reference to any pre-clearance with Congress. Since the speculation is that Obama is going to run for re-election by bashing a do-nothing Congress, maybe the plan is to put this on the table, and let Republican Congresspeople yell about closures, then attack them for being hypocrites? Am I cynical today?]

The Case for Two Parties

2012-01-08T13:30:00.003-05:00

Though as a Democrat I don't wish success to Republicans, it's true that two parties are better than one. That's true even in the District of Columbia, as shown in this Post column. Briefly, a Republican candidate identified a case of fraud committed by his opponent. Though he didn't win the election, his efforts eventually sent a city councilman to prison for 3 years. As the columnist observes, Democrats in DC often tolerate corruption. I think that's endemic in situations where the unscrupulous politician can unite a majority against an outside threat: think of Mayor Curley in Boston in midcentury rallying the Irish against the WASPs or numerous Southern politicians in the last century rallying the whites against the blacks or Joe McCarthy pitting true Americans against the subversive unAmericans.

Obama Welshes on Promise?

2012-01-07T13:03:00.000-05:00

I realize "welshes" might get me in trouble with the politically correct types, but there's a serious question raised here--whether Obama really carried out his promse.

Life Expectancy

2012-01-06T18:02:00.002-05:00

I was surprised to learn that Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders have longer life expectancies than the US.

Indian Education

2012-01-05T16:49:00.001-05:00

Ajay Shah has a discussion on the quality of Indian education. Makes an interesting contrast to the usual discussions in the US

Why Economists Are Free Marketers

2012-01-05T13:42:00.000-05:00

Reading Daniel Kahneman's new book,Thinking, Fast and Slow, still in the early chapters. He discusses "priming", the idea that by association of ideas exposure to one thing will increase the relevance of others. For example, if you're given "W--H" and "S--P" to complete after being exposed to words like "dirt" you'll likely say "wash" "soap", while if you were exposed to "hunger" it would be "soup". This is imperceptible to the person, part of what he calls System 1, though well-established by experiments.

This would explain the saying: "to the boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". The boy is primed by the hammer to see things as items to be hit.

It also explains why economists and humanists think so differently: their priming is different. Economists talk money much of the time; humanists say, with Mr. Dodgson: "The time has come, the Walrus said,To talk of many things:Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax Of cabbages and kings And why the sea is boiling hot And whether pigs have wings."

It's the Simple Things That Count: Like Concrete

2012-01-04T16:12:00.000-05:00

Charles Kenny writes:

Starting in 2000, a program inMexico's Coahuila state called "Piso Firme" (Firm Floor) offered up to $150 perhome in mixed concrete, delivered directly to families who used it to covertheir dirt floors. Scholar Paul Gertler evaluated the impact: Kids in housesthat moved from all-dirt to all-concrete floors saw parasitic infestation ratesdrop 78 percent; the number of children who had diarrhea in any given monthdropped by half; anemia fell more than four-fifths; and scores on cognitivetests went up by more than a third. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, mothers in newlycemented houses reported less depression and greater life satisfaction.)

Concrete also works for highways, which improves economies in the third world.

Farmers Market as Intermediary

2012-01-04T12:26:00.004-05:00

Jane Black writes in Wednesday's Post about a farmers market which serves as an intermediary between local farmers and their customers. Organized as a co-op, it sells the farmer's produce for a 10 percent cut of the proceeds, thereby saving the farmers from having to sell and enabling them to continue producing. It sounds good. It sounds like the Reston farmers market at the corner of Rte 7 and Baron Cameron back in the 70's, 80's, and 90's. That was run by a hippie who settled down and made his living by serving as a middleman between farmers and customers. He got into trouble with the zoning people by going too far a field for some of his products, but it worked for a long while.

Selling cooperatives go way back. They work, for a while, I think, but eventually something changes. The person who drove the enterprise gets old or tired, or both; free market forces drive expansion and conversion into something like Whole Foods, or the clientele ages, changes, or moves.

French Brides Wear Bespoke Dresses

2012-01-04T12:05:00.000-05:00

That's one fact in Dirk Beauregarde's piece on French weddings. Been a while since I married my wife, but my impression is that many if not most US brides wear off-the-rack.

That Christmas Tree Tax

2012-01-03T14:14:00.003-05:00

Steve Sexton at Freakonomics has a post defending the "Christmas tree tax" of last year. Needless to say I agree with him.

The Omni-presence of Internal Politics

2012-01-02T15:42:00.002-05:00

Read a biography of Gen. O. P. Smith, the commander of the First Marine Division in Korea. Also read the biography of Steve Jobs. In both cases, as pointed out in the case of Jobs by this Govloop post,
organizational politics played a big role in the subject's life. In any bureaucracy, military, civilian, private enterprise, what we call "politics" is always present.

The Founding Flip-Flopper

2012-01-02T12:29:00.001-05:00

Flip-flopping has a long, if not honored, history. The blog Boston 1775 moves south to Philadelphia to take note of a Revolutionary era flip-flopper in three posts. New Year's Day 1777, New Year's Day 1778 and the justification from later in 1778, after the Brits had left Philadelphia.

The last shows that the Reverend Witherspoon had a wicked sense of humor, and provides a justification which our modern day politicians could use as a pattern: "I was neither pro-[insert word of your choice, war, individual mandate, conservative, whatever] nor anti-[insert the opposite word], I was a politician.

Incidentally, I note that the verse from 1777 calls upon God, while the verse from 1778 calls upon the classical gods of Greece and Rome. Probably not significant.

"Liberating Strife"

2012-01-01T11:09:00.001-05:00

I rarely thank politicians, particularly Republican politicians. However Mr. Romney is celebrating American patriotic music, as discussed in this NYTimes piece today, and his interest triggered my interest.

And Mr. Romney does not just recite the lyrics — he annotates them, offering his interpretation of the meaning. “Most of the time when we sing a song, we don’t think much about the words,” he said. “But I’ve begun looking at these words and thinking about them.”
“O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,” he said, is a reference to the country’s soldiers. (“Any veterans in this room here today?” he asked. “Thank you for your service.”)

The complete verse reads:

O beautiful for heroes prov'd

In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country lov'd,

And mercy more than life

For those interested, Katherine Lee Bates wrote the poem in 1895. From her background and the timing, I assume the verse praises the Union soldiers of the Civil War. I suspect Mr. Romney wants it to cover the veterans of more recent wars, but that's a stretch. Indeed, Mr. Romney might want to soft-pedal his affection for the song, at least that verse, when he campaigns in South Carolina

Sssh, the Secret of Farming

2011-12-31T14:41:00.003-05:00

As it says here, for many years farmers lived on their depreciation. What that means is that as long as you have some cash flow and low debt, you can survive. That's how my father did it.

NY Times and Agriculture on 12/31/2011

2011-12-31T12:04:00.002-05:00

The Times has two stories on agriculture today: one on the growth of big organic farms outside the country, drawing down water supplies and exporting organic produce to the US; the other on the conversion of non-ag land to farmland in Iowa, and the expiration of CRP contracts.

The organic piece gets lots of exposure: comments and the top emailed piece. As the article points out, we Americans want our cheap organic tomatoes in December, and Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, and the nations in between, are willing to supply them. The growth of exports helps those nations, which isn't something the comments note, although the article does mention it.

The Iowa piece reminds me of the 70's, when Earl Butz supposedly promoted fence row to fence row planting. If the farmer is able to buy the land, he can tear out the fence rows, gaining some acreage and improving the efficiency with which he can farm. Again, it's the workings of the free market in agriculture.

Petty Bureaucracy in the Private Sector: B&B Complaints

2011-12-30T17:38:00.004-05:00

James Fallows had a bad experience with a B&B (owner forgot his reservation) and petty bureaucrats prevented him from publishing his review because he didn't actually stay at the B&B. Read the whole thing here. In the old days, this was a Catch-22.

Organic Versus Locavore

2011-12-30T14:55:00.002-05:00

There's a tension between organic food and the locavores, a tension I see in this NYTimes article. There's a scarcity of organic milk, particularly on the East Coast, partly because prices haven't risen high enough, partly because of the inflexibility of supply (takes 3 years for a dairy to convert to organic production), and partly because there's not enough organic grain grown in the East. The latter is important because grain is important for milk production; cows produce much less milk if they're simply grazing pasture and eating hay. So there's an imbalance in the food economy, an imbalance which the free market fills by transporting food/grain from distant places, but that's not something which locavores can be happy about.

How Society Changes: Imperceptibly

2011-12-29T13:09:00.001-05:00

The Post has an advice columnist, Carolyn Hax, who today had this bit from a reader:

On parenting in “the good old days”:

I had two children in the 1960s, then two more in the 1990s, a generation later, and noticed in wonder that I was a different kind of father. With my first family, I was a fairly typical parent for the times. Thirty years later, I was also a pretty typical parent for the times. The change, though I was aware of it, happened unconsciously. I was not imitating or trying to be like anyone else but had adapted, it seems, to a new parenting environment, responding to new cues.

I think the observation is true of many things: we are attuned to our environment, particularly our social environment, so whether it's fashion (observe women's fashions, tattoos, men's hairstyles), child rearing, acceptable social etiquette (jeans are okay today but smoking is not), we change.

The Victory of Government Over the Natural Life

2011-12-28T12:59:00.001-05:00

In the old days (i.e. 18th century) cities like London were sinks, people sinks, places where people died, not places where people were born and grew. The rural areas exported people to the city. Such facts of history have long governed our perceptions of the relative healthiness of cities versus country. But over time good government of the city, providing things like clean water, sanitation, reasonably clean air, good healthcare, etc. have changed the balance, leading to today's announcement that New York City, the epitome of the city for Americans, is now healthier than the rest of America. A baby born in NYC today has a longer life expectancy than a baby born elsewhere.

Understatement of the Month

2011-12-26T14:16:00.005-05:00

Musings from a Stonehead:

"They think keeping chickens is cheap and easy with minimal effort involved.
The reality is somewhat different.'

The First Woman (CED in OK)

2011-12-26T13:35:00.002-05:00

The NYTimes Magazine yesterday had as its theme obituaries of people who died in 2011. Included was a piece on people who were the "first African-American" to fill various positions. I thought of that when today I saw this obit for Lori Ross of Ardmore, OK. It includes the paragraph:

"A 1952 graduate of Wayne High School, Wayne, Okla., she then attended East Central University, Ada, Okla. Mrs. Ross was the first woman in the State of Oklahoma to hold the position of County Executive Director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Farm Service Agency. Following her retirement after more than 30 years of employment with that agency, she worked at the Marietta Public Works Authority and also the First National Bank of Marietta. She and Marty Ross were married in Dallas, Texas, on March 13, 1971.

I understand that different states accepted women as CED's at different times. I remember one district director in NC telling me confidentially he didn't believe in them: women shouldn't be subject to the rough language irate NC farmers could use. One longs for such Southern chivalry today. Or maybe he was pulling my leg?

EU Standards for Poultry, and Spanking

2011-12-26T08:23:00.002-05:00

Via Musings from a Stonehead, I learn that the UK has new standards for poultry, bigger and better cages if I understand. This is, I think, the wave of the future. The richer we get, the more we pamper our children, our animals, our environment. (I realize "pamper" reveals my age.)

See Megan McArdle's piece on spanking, the decline thereof. She argues that modern parenting is much more intensive, which to me reflects the greater availability of time and energy for child-rearing, due in part to having fewer children per household.
[Updated--put comma in title for clarity]
[Updated 2-- a link to an effort to provide homes for former battery chickens. I guess some Brits really love their fowl.]

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T16:35:00.001-05:00

No posting til Monday.

Retirement Parties, Past and Present

2011-12-23T17:08:00.000-05:00

As I said I went to Star Bryant's retirement reception/party last week, which caused me to remember some retirement parties of the past.

Some 30 years ago the usual party was at a restaurant, it was in honor of a white male, the man had started his ASCS career in a county office then moved to Washington, the party usually had been organized by the female secretaries in the division in which the man worked, it featured a lot of drinking, most of the attendees were white men, predominantly of the political party of the honoree.

Star's party reversed most of those things, but the one constant was she started her career in the county office in Johnson County, NC in 1970 or so. As she told the story, at least as I remember her telling the story, her minister sent her down to the CED at the time (William Weller(?)) because someone good/strong was needed to integrate the office (or maybe it was the tobacco market recorder position), or maybe both.

Afghanistan Status

2011-12-23T12:20:00.000-05:00

Here's a Foreign Policy article reporting some of the positives from Afghanistan in the last 10 years: more peaceful (at least violent deaths are down from the 1990's), healthier, better educated, more equal for women. more prosperous.

Drones and Aerial Photography

2011-12-22T15:52:00.001-05:00

Here's a piece at TPM about the use of drones within the US. I wonder how long it will be before FSA's aerial photography is done by drones? And disaster reporting? Fly a drone and provide a digital feed to a ground station to get good data on the extent of flooding, etc. Won't drones eventually be more economical than small planes or helicopters? If they can stay up for 36 hours they can presumably accomplish more photography than manned aircraft. And streaming the data back to the base station offers a lot of flexibility, particularly if you can feed it in as a layer to the GIS system.

I don't know: is FSA compliance still being done by aerial photography? Does ACRSI include spot checks?

The Proper Role of a Subordinate (Cont)

2011-12-22T13:14:00.002-05:00

A while back I blogged about the proper role of a subordinate in the context of Suskind's "Confidence Men," suggesting Geithner slow-walked an Obama decision and Obama's subordinates didn't always jump to.

I'm now reading "Steve Jobs", by Isaacson which includes an anecdote praising Steve's subordinates for refusing to obey his decision:

"Veterans of the Mac team had learned that they could stand upto Jobs. If they knew what they were talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even admire it. By 1983 those most familiar with his reality distortion field had discovered something further: They could, if necessary, just quietly disregard what he decreed. If they turned out to be right, he would appreaicte their renegade attitude and willingness to ignore authority. After all, that's what he did." page 145

The anecdote relates to the selection of the disk drive provider for the Mac (eventually Sony, rather than the upstart manufacturer Jobs said to use).

Misguided Obeisance to the Military

2011-12-22T13:11:00.000-05:00

The Post's blog writes about a directive to TSA to expedite clearances for military personnel which was included in the appropriations bill. As I comment there, the biggest terrorist toll in the U.S. since 9/11 was the work of a uniformed military man. Our military thankfully still reflects our society, for all its good and bad.

On the Absolute Importance of Financial Incentives

2011-12-21T08:01:00.001-05:00

From a Post article on the difficulties of drafting quarterbacks, the Dallas Cowboys personnel man opines:

Wooten said he also shied away from players considered unmotivated because they weren’t yet on an NFL team’s payroll.
“You inevitably hear a coach say to you, ‘When he starts getting paid, it’s going to be different,’ ” Wooten said. “That should send a red flag. I have been around long enough to know that money doesn’t make players better. If anything, it makes them worse.”

Call Me Conservative?

2011-12-20T14:14:00.000-05:00

I consider myself liberal, but when I read this Ezra Klein pass-on of a Timothy Noah column, I seem to have a conservative knee-jerk reaction. The issue is a Republican proposal to allow states to require a drug test for and enrollment in a GED program for recipients of unemployment insurance.

Noah sees them this way: "Their purpose is to make people who receive unemployment benefits understand that they are losers, and must be stigmatized and harrassed [sic] until they prove themselves worthy."

Whatever the motives of the Republicans who are pushing them, and I suspect them, my bottom line is I've got no problem in requiring the recipient of taxpayer dollars (technically it's "insurance", not taxes, but it's using the authority of the government) to do something. In my dream world I'd encourage those who don't have a job and don't have a high school diploma and have time on their hands (i.e., no pre-school kids) to work on their GED. And I'd have no problem with a drug test, provided there's a program available to help those who are using drugs. So I could buy a deal where the Republicans extended unemployment insurance payments and paired it with a drug testing/treatment program and a GED training program. Of course, the Republicans I assume are including the requirements without the programs.

A Look Back at the Housing Bubble

2011-12-20T08:50:00.000-05:00

Happened to use Zillow to check some housing prices. As we can see, in this area in Manassas Park, VA the housing bubble collapsed and has not recovered.

I think it's a true fact Manassas Park was home to a concentration of Latino immigrants, many in construction. So when the bubble popped, along with a hostile political climate in the county (Prince William), lots left, and prices fell accordingly.

Government Doesn't Care About Taxpayers

2011-12-19T18:15:00.000-05:00

I'm skimming a recent report on federal government websites. Page 12 shows the primary audiences which range from Federal employees, consumers, business, researchers, etc. etc. but no taxpayers.

(Can't copy it or I would) Some excerpts, with bracketed comments:

86% of the live domains and 71% of the domains under development had been updated in the past six months, as of October, 2011, when agencies conducted the inventories. [Updating within a 6-month period is a very low threshold.]

Takeaways: [as labelled by the report}

Inconsistency across agencies:The amount of data varied greatly across agencies. Some agencies were able to provide more complete data, while other agencies struggled to develop a clear picture of their web footprint because of decentralized operating units.

Incomplete data: Several agencies did not know the answers to all of the questions, and many noted that this inventory is the first of its kind in their agency.

Decentralization: Nearly all of the agencies alluded to the fact that much of the decision-making with regard to specific domains/websites happens within operating units and not at an agency level. Varying levels of maturity: Some agencies have clearly set web policies, while many agencies are still working to develop more formal web guidance and governance policies.

Need for more Federal guidance: Many agencies asked for additional guidance and assistance in developing integrated web governance plans and migration processes for their domains.

Dedication to improvement: Nearly all of the agencies made comments to illustrate their dedication to improving web governance and communications at their agency.

Benefits may come at a cost: A few agencies noted that the benefits of integration are extremely important but that integration may come at a cost.

Measurement takeaways:

Lack of consistent performance metrics: Nineteen of the major agencies (79%) reported that they did not use the same performance metrics to consistently evaluate agency websites across the agency; each site uses its own combination of methods.

Metrics not standardized: Several agencies commented that even though the same tools are used, the metrics from those tools are not consistently gathered, implemented and applied. Web analytics is the most commonly used method: Most agencies (10 out of 24) referred to using web analytics tools to measure performance.

[I wish they had collected and published the metrics, or at least noted if any websites published the metrics.]

Here's the link to the "dialog" website they used to gather public comments.

Film Projectionist and Kodak

2011-12-19T13:34:00.001-05:00

An interesting piece in Technology Review about an innovative digital movie camera which is taking over the industry. Meanwhile the job of film projectionist is endangered, as is the Kodak chemist.

Those Healthy School Lunches

2011-12-18T16:24:00.001-05:00

The cynic in me gloats over this report in the LA Times, hat tip Kevin Drum, on how poorly the newly healthy lunch menus has been greeted in the LA schools.

I wonder if USDA will pull the award: "This year, L.A. Unified, which serves 650,000 meals daily, has received awards for improving its school lunches, including one last week from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and another from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine."

To be fair, some of the innovations are working well; as I've always said, it's hard if not impossible to do things right the first time. One of the key faults is that the food which was acceptable in their tests turned unacceptable when prepared by the regular kitchens. As Megan McArdle would say: scalability, and repeatability could when you're basing decisions on pilot tests.

[Update: McArdle picks up the story and discusses reasons why pilot tests aren't necessarily predictive.]

Outwalking Death

2011-12-18T11:19:00.000-05:00

This MSNBC article reports research which says if you can walk faster than 2 mph, you're probably in good enough shape to keep Death at bay. The good news is I can easily walk faster than that. The bad news, which the article doesn't cover, is that the Big Al (as in Alzheimers) walks faster than Death.

Henry Blodget and My Mother

2011-12-17T16:32:00.001-05:00

Mr. Blodget has a thought experiment called Millionaire's Island, in which he gathers the 1 percent of Americans who have the biggest incomes and gives them an island to live on. He has a lot of fun with it, sometimes in ways which my mother would approve. She thought farmers were the most important people in the society, because without them people would go naked and starve. Blodget says the same: without the 99 percent the 1 percent would go naked and starve.

CRS on Farm Bill Future

2011-12-17T15:10:00.002-05:00

Here's the Congressional Research Service's latest take on the farm bill, proposals for change floated in connection with the super committee, and what happens next.

[Update: the CRS says the total farm programs cost $15.7 billion: 5.7 for commodity programs, 7.8 for risk management and crop insurance, 1.7 for disaster. ]

Twelfth Night, Martha Washington, and French Bread

2011-12-17T12:15:00.001-05:00

In days of yore Martha Washington would have her Great Cake prepared for Twelfth Night, also her wedding anniversary. You start by separating the yolks and whites of 40 eggs!

By chance I read about the Great Cake in the Post, then read Dirk Beauregarde's long piece on French bakers--boulangeries, which devotes space to the French custom of having the galette des rois on Twelfth Night (I think it means the "cake of the king") or at least in January.

Riches at NCUA and FCA

2011-12-16T17:16:00.002-05:00

A list of the highest paid Federal employees shows mostly doctors at the top. But the National Credit Union Administration and the Farm Credit Administration are able to pay their admin heads $260,000. Many Americans think that meets the definition of riches.

The Importance of Slack

2011-12-16T14:06:00.000-05:00

I walk past Reston's Dogwood pool every day. The Reston Association has a proposal to redo the pool and its surroundings which is going through the hearings process. As part of that they've had a crew string white tape through the nearby trees, I guess to outline the area where trees will be cleared. What the crew does is tie the tape around one sapling (2-3" at shoulder height) then run the tape to another sapling and tie again, repeating the process around the area. Unfortunately, every time they run the tape they make it taut between each sapling. When they're through everything looks fine and neat. As time passes though, and the wind blows, and the saplings start to move, and they move in different directions, the result is the tape is first stressed and then it snaps. So a month later there are just a few segments of intact tape, but most are broken. Another month passes and RA sends the crew out again to remark the site.

Sometimes in life it's important to leave some slack.

Nostalgia Day at Farm Service Agency

2011-12-15T15:14:00.001-05:00

Just attended Star Bryant's retirement party, 41 years of service and still looking good. Good to see some former co-workers, though the number is dwindling every year.

Target Price and Planted Acres

2011-12-14T13:36:00.002-05:00

I hadn't heard of this possibility, but the winter canola people are opposed (from today's Farm Policy):

"Yesterday’s update noted that, “The Plains winter canola delegation made the trip to DC to voice their concerns and opposition to a new updated target price program under which deficiency payments would be ‘recoupled’ to production on planted acres up to the total aggregate crop base acres of a farm, effectively reversing the planting flexibility that has been in place since the 1996 farm bill. The target price program was reportedly a component of the legislation that the agriculture committees had intended to submit to the Super Committee as agriculture’s $23 billion contribution to deficit reduction before those efforts failed on November 23rd.

Fraud Recoveries, Bravo Obama

2011-12-13T12:51:00.002-05:00

I could be cynical about this, but I'll take the story in the Post at face value, that is the Obama administration is doing well at identifying fraud:

Fraud recoveries are up considerably in recent years, the administration officials said, jumping by 167 percent since 2008. Justice has recovered $15 billion in total fraud since 2009, of which $8.4 billion was tied to health care fraud

"Shovel Ready" Projects

2011-12-12T18:23:00.000-05:00

Last week's NYTimes had a piece on Vermont's efforts to recover from the damages wrought by Irene. Apparently they're almost done replacing and repairing the bridges, roads, etc. which were damaged, making repairs much faster and much cheaper than the governor had originally thought possible..

A couple other data points: there was the replacement of the Minneapolis bridge over the Mississippi and the repair in California of earthquake damage, IIRC, to a bridge. In all three cases, construction went faster than people thought possible.

Compare this with Obama's complaint that the "shovel-ready" projects funded by his stimulus turned out not to be so shovel ready after all and the recurrent comparisons of the speed with which China is doing big construction jobs with our slowness.

Now the key to the fast work in VT, CA, MN was it was reconstructing something, not doing it for the first time, and the "something" was critical infrastructure. So on the one hand you had a vocal constituency for fast action; all the people whose commutes were disrupted or travel prevented by the lack of a workable bridge or highway would make their voices heard. I well remember from my working days how upset I could get if my commute was screwed up.

On the other hand, there's really no opposing force: the taxpayers recognize that damage due to natural disasters has to be repaired. And there's no NIMY's at work--the neighbors, if any and there may not be many, have already been living with the bridge or highway and have adjusted their lives to it. Anyone who was really hurt by the initial building has likely moved away, so the calculation of utility in this case shows everyone wins and no one loses.

Unfortunately this logic doesn't work for most projects. Yes, there are a few straight reconstructions, but in most cases projects involve changes, replacing an old 2-lane bridge with a 4-lane, widening and straightening a highway, etc. Change means there's likely NIMBY's, who must be assuaged by a consultation and review process. That's what democracy requires, unlike the command state of China.

Cruelty to Hens

2011-12-12T15:46:00.000-05:00

Treehugger has a post trumpeting McDonald's decision to drop an egg supplier whose workers abused their chickens.

Here I have to reveal my crimes of the past: upon occasion when I was a boy I was cruel to some of our hens, doing some of the same things cited in the piece. I won't defend what I did. I will say, perhaps showing a conservative streak, whenever one person has power over something or someone you run the danger of abuse. That's true whether you're giving a young soldier a gun and putting him in a foreign land or giving a growing boy power over hens.

Based on that conviction I say to my foodie friends they can't assume that hens will get humane treatment with small growers. They just can't. Humans can be evil. I know, I was one.

What's the Proper Role of a Subordinate?

2011-12-12T14:24:00.000-05:00

I read "Confidence Men" by Ron Suskind. He criticizes Larry Summers (or quotes sources criticizing him) for "relitigating" issues rather than saluting smartly and going off to see the president's previous decision was promptly implemented. It's part of a general theory that Obama was inexperienced as a manager, not well served by Emanuel and other staff with more experience, and not comfortable with some of the issues.

Of course, in my experience, not in the White House but in the South Building, it's usually the case that the subordinate knows more than the boss; that's the result of bureaucratic specialization. And what we know, or think we know, often ties to strong emotions: most people like to be right. It's also the case the boss never knows everything the subordinate is doing, or has to do. And sometimes it's the case the boss doesn't know what has to be done to implement a decision. Put everything together and it's quite possible for boss and subordinate to have different views on what happens after a meeting when a decision is made.

Bureaucrats Can Please

2011-12-11T11:33:00.001-05:00

Prof. Frank writes in the NYTimes in praise of the Ithaca, NY DMV office.

Why Bureaucrats Don't Like Contractors

2011-12-08T12:49:00.001-05:00

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries posts about a scandal at Aerospace Corp. Seems they employed on a government contract a Phd from Oxford who really had only a high school diploma, and who didn't work the hours he claimed. Aerospace didn't have any incentive to police him because they were charging the government more than they were paying the supposed engineer.

$20000 an Acre

2011-12-08T12:09:00.001-05:00

Is there anyone who doesn't think this is a bubble? (Someone paid $20,000 an acre for Iowa farmland.) I'll admit it's possible that the bubble's bursting won't be like the early 1980's, but still. The Kansas City FRB weighs in.

Atlantic on Crop Programs

2011-12-06T15:39:00.001-05:00

Gabriel Silverman has an article on the rise of crop insurance in the Atlantic. I think this is part of the process of educating the chattering classes on this development. Of course, based on past experience there will still be lots of misinformation floating around. (Like the idea the government subsidizes tobacco. )

Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City

2011-12-06T15:33:00.001-05:00

I have this picture from 1966/7 in the suburbs of Saigon.

Brad Plumer has a lunch break video of modern day Ho Chi Minh city.

Food Shortages in the U.S.?

2011-12-06T08:41:00.001-05:00

Farm Policy carried this quote:

“‘Because we are a nation that hasn’t really experienced food shortages in recent memory, folks forget the role that [farmers] play on a lot of different levels,’ said Mike Torrey, executive vice president of Crop Insurance and Reinsurance Bureau, a lobbying group for the crop insurance industry.”

Got me wondering: when was the last time we had food scarcity in the U.S.? I mean something serious, not just a price spike. I don't think ever, though maybe back in 1816, when I remember it was the year without a summer. (My memory for long ago times is good.)

My bottom line: the controlling factor is our land and climate. Whether we have 9 million 40 acre farms or 90,000 4,000 acre farms we're going to have enough food, Mother Nature willing. I think farm programs and crop insurance work mostly to modify the churn, the "creative destruction" which is found in the farm economy. Despite all the government interventions, at bottom crops are commodities produced and sold in relatively free markets where usually the buyers have lots more market power than the sellers.

Using Measurements on Social Media

2011-12-05T15:33:00.001-05:00

This week's report: USDA had 52,122 followers, 1 inquiry, 1 answer.

I very much like the idea of measuring what you're trying to do. Of course, extending myself to blogging seems have been a bridge just far enough, going to Facebook or Twitter is something I just haven't done. With no first hand experience, it follow that I'm in a poor position to give advice, not that that stops me.

I'm not sure what Twitter can do for USDA, but it seems to me the metric above suggests trying something different. If I were dictator for a day, maybe I'd offer a $5000 prize for the county employee who made the most innovative use of Twitter for FSA operations over the course of a year. Not sure how it would be measured, but I'm sure someone could figure it out.

Doctor: What Would You Choose To Do for Yourself?

2011-12-05T14:09:00.001-05:00

According to this post (hat tip Marginal Revolution), doctors don't choose heroic measures at the end of life. I note VA has just announced a database for advance health directives. That's something I really should do.
[updated with the registry link]

First We Kill All the Lawyers; and Make the World Happier

2011-12-05T13:10:00.001-05:00

In two ways: the rest of us have no lawyers to deal with and we lose a bunch of people who are so depressed they bring down the happiness curve for the rest of us. From here--the logic of the research is that lawyers are pessimists, always worrying about what could go wrong.

80,000 Square Yards

2011-12-05T13:06:00.001-05:00

The headline on the Treehugger post is: "

Paris to Plant 80,000 Square Yards of Green Roofs and Rooftop Gardens by 2020

That converts to 16.528 acres, which might could provide food for maybe, oh I don't know, 100? gai Parisiennes?

(To give them their due, the actual article doesn't talk about food, but insulation. But this is a prime example of how to lie with statistics; of course if they'd used square feet the figure would be even more impressive.)

On the Virtues of Patience

2011-12-04T10:50:00.001-05:00

Musings from a Stonehead explains what's needed to capture a moment on film.

From a different post, just as an indicator it's worth clicking through to the site.

Who Remembers the Flight Engineer? Whither the Pilot

2011-12-04T10:39:00.001-05:00

Used to be a job, but no more. See this Hanson pickup of a story on automated flight.

EU Farmers and Farm Programs

2011-12-03T13:35:00.001-05:00

A picture of EU agriculture from this (the context is the proper relationship between payments for grassland and payments for croplant):

It is about farmers who are farmers just to obtain subsidies and who fulfil their income goals only by subsidies. Perhaps, they have a few animals, although an increasing number of them only own grassland. From the agronomic point of view, this is intolerable, as the cultivation of hay for selling is not considered economically viable. In Slovenia, there are more than a quarter of agricultural holdings with grassland but no animals, but they apply for direct payments. Among them, there are less and less farmers and more and more mere land owners, who will have an increasing interest in the expansion of land, which they would rent out and if nothing else, split the subsidies with a tenant.

Why Do Farms Grow Bigger?

2011-12-03T13:07:00.001-05:00

The University of Illinois reports on levels of debt and machinery costs, which says farmers are investing but not overextending. But one chart caught my eye: it's a graph showing the per acre debt/machinery costs by farm size. The curve descends, slowly but steadily. In other words, the bigger the farm, the more acres you can spread the cost of equipment over. What a surprise.

Government Contracting

2011-12-03T12:58:00.001-05:00

For many years I lived blissfully without having any dealings with government contractors. Basically ASCS was, at least as far as I knew, all its work using its own employees. So it was an eye-opener in the late 80's when I started to run into government contracting, partly on the System/36 replacement project and a bit later on the Info Share project.

At least in my memory, the contractors were uniformly 8a firms, meaning their ownership was minority, women, disabled, with bigger outfits like Boeing and SAIC as their subcontractors. That seems to have continued with recent FSA projects.

Here's a govloop post from a disgruntled subcontractor (no relationship to USDA) which gives another side of the picture. Essentially the story is that the prime contractor systematically screwed the sub. Don't know whether it's true or not, don't know whether the government agency was satisfied with the performance under the contract, but it sure doesn't increase my faith in the use of contractors.

Locavore Water?

2011-12-03T10:56:00.001-05:00

Onthepublicrecord is a blog about California water, interesting though sometimes hard to follow for an outsider. The most recent post discusses squabbling over who has first dibs on California water, morphing into a thesis about shared resources in a political entity.

I wonder what the locavore position on water is: should we use only the rain which falls on our land, or can the whole watershed share the water, and if so what is the watershed?