Small Truckers, Small Dairy Farmers

A good piece here on the plight of the small trucker--the owner/operator. It reminds me of Northview Dairy, the owners of which just sold off their cows. 

I suppose conservative economists would point to "creative destruction", the process by which the free market makes everything better and better for everyone, over the long run.  As an ambivalent liberal, I resist that.  Economic change has real costs and hurts real people. When I ask myself would the world be a better place if we froze  things as they were in 1950, or 1900, or 1491, I have to answer "no",  but as the great Heinlein wrote: there's no such thing as a free lunch.

The White House Garden: The Truth Revealed

My title is false advertising.  I've not posted about the White House garden recently, though it had its spring planting a couple weeks ago or more.

Government Executive runs a piece from the daughter of the farmer who supplied the dirt and the initial plan for the garden.  It's nice, not sensationalistic as my title would suggest.  What does come through for me, as I may have commented on in past posts, is the tension between the public play-acting and the real reality (as opposed to the unreal reality, not to be confused with the fake reality).   As an Obama supporter I take the First Lady at her word--when she started the garden she probably did have the idea that the girls would participate and it would be a real garden.  Because we, the great unwashed American public, demand perfection of our temporary royalty, that was never possible.  In the real world we sow our seeds too thickly and don't get the crop we should.  In the world of the White House, the gardeners can't admit to such failings, must always be on display, meaning the plants must always live in Lake Woebegone. 

I'm Curious--Post Pigford

Some factoids and a question:

•  Secretary Vilsack made a commitment to changing the culture of USDA's county level agencies. 
• The Pigford II payments have been issued.
• There have been changes in the farm loan legislation/programs, earmarking some dollars for socially-disadvantaged, etc. etc.
• ERS has recently reported growth in the number of farms operated by various categories--minorities and women, etc. 

I wonder if there's a data collection and analysis effort which compares FSA/RD/NRCS efforts in the last couple years, with the new culture and the new programs, with the efforts 20 years ago?  How much has changed, and why?

Robot Day: Cows and Grapes

The NY Times has an article on milking robots. 
I'd read about robotic milkers before, perhaps even posted on them, but this is the first report describing units with no human intervention, meaning the cows can determine when they want to be milked!  So the march of technology has the effect of increasing the "agency" of cows, making for more contented cows, I suppose.  (Was it Elsie, the Carnation cow, which keyed their ad campaigns in the 1950's?   NO, my memory is faulty--Elsie was the Borden's cow.  And, coincidentally, one of the dairymen in the article is named Borden, a seventh-generation farmer.)  Will the crunchy food movement celebrate this advance in animal liberation? 

Seriously, this and similar advances elsewhere in farming pose the problem for the farmer: give up, get out, grow up.  You need a bigger operation to make the best use of machines (although apparently California operations are too big) or cope with new regulations, etc.   The other problem is the infrastructure.  If you're depending on a machine to milk your cows, you can't afford power outages (hand-milking even 12 cows when the power goes off is not fun).  And you can't afford malfunctions--I assume the vendors have some support system to provide loaner units with a very short response time, like 1-3 hours.

Elsewhere, Technology Review has a post on agricultural drones. I wonder when FSA will start using them?

ACA and FSA

From the NASCOE President's message: "

"Here we are in 2014 and we still don’t have a good online tool for producers to communicate and file applications on the simplest of programs (okay there are no simple programs)."

Now I don't know how complex the ACA health insurance program is, as compared to the FSA programs.  Obviously there were problems with the software last October, and I gather it's still incomplete as far as payments goes.  But HHS only had a few years to get the software done and tested, while FSA has had over 20 years since the idea was floated.  I'm really p****d at the botched rollout of healthcare.gov; it's almost enough to make me regret my political allegiance.  But I guess if I'm going to be fair, I should admit that compared to USDA/FSA HHS looks pretty good.  (That's probably the first and last compliment HHS will ever receive on their IT implementation.)

It's easy to argue I'm comparing apples and oranges, because I think administering the insurance program will be handled by the insurance company, not by the healthcare.gov website. And the philosophical question is simple: do you want to maximize efficiency or employment in rural areas.  If the former, then go the way some of the loan programs did--centralize administration in St. Louis.  If the latter, become friends with the senators and representative and fight to keep all offices open. 

I suspect we'll continue to muddle our way down the road, closing some offices, doing some modernization, trying to reach both goals: efficiency and rural life.

The Price of Eggs (Volatility, Integration, and Tuition)

Yglesias at Vox posts on the recent price of eggs.

What's interesting is the volatility; over the course of a year (2008) it looks as if the price increased about a dollar, or maybe by 80 percent.  Now I can remember the price of eggs bouncing around in my youth.  IIRC they maybe went from 30 cents to 70 cents and back down (and up and down and up and down).  This was at the end of the era of small flocks, right as the industry started to be vertically integrated, with companies contracting with farmers.  I had always thought the purpose was to gain market power, by reducing the egg suppliers to a handful of companies they could collaborate to adjust supply and thereby keep prices relatively steady.  Now the graph only covers the last 10 years and shows a steady rise in prices but not much volatility except for the one year, so I'm not sure whether my understanding of the economics is wrong, or whether 2008 was an outlier. 

A side note: if the change in the price of eggs from 1954 to 2014 had tracked the price of tuition and fees at the college I attended, the price would be close to $100 now.

"Responsible drinkers don't build breweries. "

That's my sentence of the day, from an interview at Vox with someone who studied legalization of pot.

We humans always overdo on something, or rather there's always some humans who will overdo on any good thing.

Taxpayer Receipt

At the Whitehouse website you can put in the income tax and FICA taxes you pay and see where the money went.  I tried to embed it here, but the code didn't work for me.  I wrote the White House--will be interested to see what the result, if any, is. 

Anyhow, it's a useful idea--people when polled have little idea of how much money goes for each function in government.

FSA Faces the Future, Sort of

Some states have legalized industrial hemp growing, so FSA has to determine how to report it.  I guess the response is rational; it's adding a new "product" to the table.

Boxers or Briefs?

That was the question President Clinton was asked on some show which some people thought he shouldn't have been on and definitely shouldn't have answered.  We value our privacy, maybe.

I was reminded today of the good old days, before clothes dryers, when washed clothes were hung on the line, even in winter, because somehow they'd dry even though they froze.  But I digress.  What I really was reminded of was how the neighbors could and would eye your lines, knowing whether the woman of the house was adhering to the proper schedule for washing clothes, etc.  And seeing what you wore.  At least in principle, although apparently some housewives would hang the underwear of the family on the interior lines, more hidden from prying eyes, except on the days the wind blew.   (I say apparently because we lived far enough off the main road that we were safe from such eyes, except for the people who came in to buy eggs and milk.

Was Everything Better in the Old Days?

No.  For proof, compare this photograph of the cherry blossoms post-WWI with this one from this year.  A reminder: trees grow and fill out.  And inventive people come up with things like color photography and the Internet, permitting millions to share in the beauty.

Tidbits from John Phipps

John has a post on global warming, noting the expansion of Canada's growing season, meaning their acreage of corn is expanding. (He suggests looking at such evidence on the ground is more likely to be convincing than the IPCC studies, and I agree. A sidenote: apparently Canada and the US are on the same path of expanding the use of crop insurance.

Who Wins and Loses With Crop Insurance

Farmdocdaily (IL extension) has a post on the state-level distribution of direct payments versus crop insurance.  Most states (32 of them) are pretty close in their share but these states differ significantly:

Eleven states had a difference of 1.5 or more percentage points (a "+" sign means insurance share exceeded direct payment share):  Texas (+8.8%), North Dakota (+4.1%), South Dakota (+3.3%), Kansas (+1.9%), California (-1.8%), Louisiana (-1.9%), Iowa (-2.0%), Ohio (-2.1%), Minnesota (-2.9%), Nebraska (-3.0%), and Arkansas (-3.8%).

Bottomline: Great Plains states with higher risk and more variable production get more crop insurance, non Great Plains states less.  As the study observes, it raises the possibility that crop insurance will encourage the shift of production to more risky areas.  As a second thought, though, "shift" is perhaps the wrong term; "expansion" might be better.   Maybe we should view crop insurance as one measure by which agriculture is adjusting to global warming?

Transparency and Doctors

HHS has released data on Medicare payments to doctors, which are discussed here.  The Post had a good article this morning, discussing some of the reasons for variations in payments among specialties, etc.  Putting that story and the Wonkblog post together gives the usual conclusion: it's complicated.  Maybe I'm biased, but when I read articles about farm policy and the food movement that's my usual reaction: you're oversimplifying, it's more complicated than that.  I'd venture to state a general rule: the knowledge an insider has is more complicated than the knowledge an outsider can discover. 

Having said that, I have to go back 20 years when EWG was suing USDA for payments to farmers.  My reaction then, in discussions with an IT person, was reserved--it seemed to me that we treated farmers as persons under the Privacy Act, which meant their data should be private as well.  The Court of Appeals for the district disagreed with my opinion.  Over the years I've come to believe that government payments should be public.  Even though I've little faith in the ability of the media to get a good understanding of the issues, either with farm payments or doctors payments, more data is better than less.

50th Anniversaries: IBM 360

Here's a long piece on the IBM 360, which celebrates its 50th anniversary, at least of its announcement, this year.  This wikipedia article says there's no working 360 in existence. 

The trip down memory lane naturally led me to this wikipedia article on COBOL, which I see is still around and kicking.

Common Ag Policy

The EU used to have a CAP blog, but these days it only gets posted in German.  I may be half-German, but I don't read it so I haven't kept up with EU developments.  Today I got to this BBC article on the EU: 

According to my mental math, the EU is spending about $80 billion on its ag policy.  A couple paragraphs from the article shows some differences, and some commonalties with ours:

...greening targets have been watered down, environmentalists say: the requirement for arable farmers to grow at least three different crops, to promote biodiversity; for farmers to leave 7% of their land fallow, to encourage wildlife; and for farmers to maintain pasture land permanently, rather than ploughing it up.

The definition of an "active farmer" has also been contentious. The current payments system is largely based on land area and past subsidy levels, meaning that landowners like airports and sports clubs, which do not farm, have been getting subsidies based on their grasslands or other eligible land areas.

Mark Bittman and IPCC on Yield Changes

Mark Bittman writes in April 2 NYTImes about the IPCC report with the theme the effects of climate warming

"So yields of corn and wheat are down and falling while prices are going up."

From an NPR interview with an IPCC scientist, who didn't concur with the final report:

"Take crop yields, for example. The report says climate change will cause them to fall by a few percent per decade. But Tol says technological innovation will likely raise crop yields by 10 percent or more each decade.
"So it's not that crop yields are going to fall, but they're going to rise more slowly because of climate change," he says. "And then of course it doesn't sound as alarming."

From the IPCC report.

Current economic studies of climate change that include farm- and/or market-level adjustments suggest that the negative effects of climate change on agriculture probably have been overestimated by studies that do not account for adjustments that will be made. This may be caused by the ability of the agricultural production community to respond with great flexibility to a gradually changing climate. Typically, extreme weather poses a significant challenge to individual farming operations that may lack the spatial diversity and financial resources of large, integrated, corporate enterprises with production capabilities in one or more areas.

Simulation modeling using four GCM-based scenarios showed that U.S. cereal production decreases by 21-38% when farmers continue to do what they are now doing (i.e., no adaptation) (see Table 15-4). When scenarios that involve adaptation by farmers are used, decreases in cereal production are not as large and the adaptations are shown to offset the initial climate-induced reduction by 35-60% (Schimmelpfennig et al., 1996; Segerson and Dixon, 1999).

And

When autonomous agronomic adaptation is included, crop modeling assessments indicate, with medium to low confidence⁶, that climate change will lead to generally positive responses at less than a few °C warming and generally negative responses for more than a few °C in mid-latitude crop yields. 

Vilsack on FSA Offices

From Agweb, on Vilsack's Hill testimony:

Vilsack said he would like to see three types of FSA offices in the future: central offices with a supervisor and three or more employees, branch offices with at least three employees, but no supervisor, and satellite offices where people could obtain information by appointment.

Vilsack said he would like to see three types of FSA offices in the future: central offices with a supervisor and three or more employees, branch offices with at least three employees, but no supervisor, and satellite offices where people could obtain information by appointment. He emphasized the restructuring effort is not about saving money, but modernizing the system, and that he would like to see the FSA offices “provide additional information above and beyond what they traditionally do.

 “Part of this modernization effort is really designed to make them a one-stop shop for farmers who are looking for information on rural development programs, how they might enter into the local regional food system opportunities, how they might take advantage of conservation programs, and have the FSA offices act as a bridge or connector with those other opportunities,” Vilsack said.


 Vilsack said he would like to see three types of FSA offices in the future: central offices with a supervisor and three or more employees, branch offices with at least three employees, but no supervisor, and satellite offices where people could obtain information by appointment.
He emphasized the restructuring effort is not about saving money, but modernizing the system, and that he would like to see the FSA offices “provide additional information above and beyond what they traditionally do.” “Part of this modernization effort is really designed to make them a one-stop shop for farmers who are looking for information on rural development programs, how they might enter into the local regional food system opportunities, how they might take advantage of conservation programs, and have the FSA offices act as a bridge or connector with those other opportunities,” Vilsack said.

See more at: http://www.agweek.com/event/article/id/23006/#sthash.WO6wSuZD.dpuf