Pink Slime Defended

Via Tyler Cowen, here's a defense of "pink slime", also quoting a NYTimes blogger. The short version is that it's been used in ground beef since beef prices soared in the '70's (our going off gold, jump in grain prices as USSR started buying, etc.), has been safe since Jack in the Box went out of business in the 90's, and makes hamburger lower in fat..

The defense makes sense, but it assumes consumers really want to understand how food gets on their table. In my cynical view today, they don't, because if they did they'd face much higher food bills.. The food movement will be able to whack a few moles, artisanal food producers will be able to find some niches, but the vast majority of the food that goes on our tables will be produced by "industrial agriculture". 

GPRA: Measuring Performance

Some 20 or so years after the GPRA was passed, we'll still trying to figure out how to measure performance.  The latest buzzword is "cascading".

More Young People Running Small Farms?

One of the fault lines in the green/food movement is shown here.  Ideally they'd like to see more young farmers and small farmers.  They'd also like conservation. But, as quoted from Farm Policy:

“He [Sen. Baucus MT] says there needs to be a balance in the conservation reserve program lands saying, ‘CRP [Conservation Reserve Program] tends to have an adverse effect on some of the smaller towns, on implement dealers for example. Sometimes farmers just go south and have land in CRP and take the income. We’re actually starting to reduce CRP in a way to help younger people get in to agriculture.’”

That's been there since the beginning, or at least the 1930's.  If you take land out of agricultural production, whether for conservation purposes because it's below-average land and subject to erosion, etc., or because you want to reduce production in order to increase prices, you can endanger the people who depend on farmers to make a living and by increasing the value of the remaining farm land you make it harder for people to begin farming.

The old saw goes: there's no such thing as a free lunch, meaning there's always tradeoffs.

Why We Had the Agricultural Adjustment Administration

Via Matt Yglesias, this map at Slate shows how how population changed at the county level during the Depression.  Counties in the wheat area/Great Plains suffered a loss of more than 10 percent during the 10 years, in some cases more than 25 percent. That's not just the children growing up and moving away, that's families moving (i.e., Steinbeck's Joads and the other Okies.).

The distress behind those population changes is why the New Deal passed a bunch of laws relating to agriculture and rural life.


A note: as I blogged yesterday the 1940 census records included a question on where you lived in 1935, so it should be possible to construct a map showing migration during 1930-35, and 1935-40.

Having Fun with Farmers and Ranchers

Chris Clayton enjoys poking fun at the US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance for bragging on their PR successes at the same time a producer of lean finely textured beef (the "pink slime") is going into bankruptcy.

1940 Census Records and the Return from Farming

I was lucky that ancestry.com chose NY as one of the first states for which to process 1940 census images, so I was able to see the entries for my family (not me, I just missed it so I'll have to wait another 10 years to see myself recorded).  I had a couple of surprises:

• first, the census for the first and only time asked where people had lived in 1935. Now I had assumed that my neighborhood was stable and unchanging, but it turned out about half the people on the page with my family had moved in the last 5 years.  
• second, my father listed his income as $0.  (Yes, the census bureau was asking about family income back then--our forebears weren't as touchy about releasing personal data as we seem to be today.  Or maybe they had more respect for authority and the establishment.)  Dad was one of the early farmers who participated in a cost-accounting study from Cornell extension.  Not that he was a great record keeper; I'm sure I inherited my disorderly gene from him.  But yearly I think it was he would put on a push to update his cost accounts on the forms Cornell provided him.  I don't remember whether the Extension professor picked them up in person, or dad mailed them off. So I suspect dad's report of $0 was based on his cost accounts, which would have subtracted from his gross income the interest earned on the capital invested.   That used to be a sore point with my mother, who got very fierce about underpaid farmers, often claiming farmers would be better off selling out and investing the returns for a safe return.  The bottom line was the family had a small positive cash flow, but we weren't doing well.

Maple Syrup and Commercial Production

We had a big maple shading our yard, which once I tapped and made a little bit of maple syrup from the sap.  Only once, because I didn't and don't have the patience needed to boil down the sap.  But my memories of that long-ago episode meant  I found this post at Casaubon's Book on the plight of New York syrup makers interesting.  The unusually warm weather meant production is way down. And most interesting was the idea of a vacuum system, which commercial producers now use to extract sap.  $10,000 for such a system won't sound like much to commercial grain producers in the Midwest, but it's a step up for people who didn't use to need such capital.

Kevin Drum Loves Factory Farming

That's a tongue-in-cheek part of his reaction to a report on what Americans spend their money on compared to other countries. Food is low on our list.

[Updated to correct grammar]

Pink Slime Meets Green Slime

I've said a couple times that calling the thing "pink slime" is the most effective framing of an issue since the Republicans came up with the "death tax".  I'm amused by this Grist piece, which suggests that "pink slime" may contribute to the good taste of hamburgers and recounts the efforts of an organic beef producer to come up with an organic equivalent, which he calls "green slime".   His efforts, though, cause me to rethink my position: I now think "pink slime" is a much more effective framing than is the death tax.

Successful Illinois Grain Farms

Illinois extension has studied factors leading to success in Illinois grain farms.  Here's the bottomline:

In summary, this series on farm performance has shown that grain farms which achieve higher yields and receive higher prices earn greater returns consistently over time and within any given crop year when examining the 2005 to 2009 period. On the cost side, farms earning higher returns also have lower costs of production, and there is a wider gap in power costs between the top and bottom performance groups compared to direct input costs. In terms of farm size and tenure position, larger operations with more total acres and fewer acres rented under fixed cash rent agreements are characteristics of the higher return groups.[my emphasis]

 It goes on to say that most of the success is the ability to achieve higher yields; good marketing doesn't account for much of the differences among farms. Once again, IMHO farmers are price takers, not price makers.