Blogging on bureaucracy, organizations, USDA, agriculture programs, American history, the food movement, and other interests. Often contrarian, usually optimistic, sometimes didactic, occasionally funny, rarely wrong, always a nitpicker.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Overlapping Missions? USGS and NRCS
Friday, July 01, 2011
A Field Is a Field Is a Pothole?
In other developments, a program announcement yesterday from USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) stated that, “[RMA] Administrator William Murphy today announced a change in qualification requirements for farmers in ‘prairie pothole states’ who want to obtain prevented planting insurance. The change is intended to assist farmers who have experienced difficulties due to excessive moisture in their fields over recent years. Beginning with the 2012 crop year, a crop must be grown on the acreage at least one of the previous four years if a farmer wishes to qualify. The states of Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota are covered by the change. All other policy provisions must also be met.Way back when (1981 I think) the North Dakota state specialist called in to be sure we meant a change in our procedures pertaining to potholes. (Potholes result when a retreating glacier leaves a block of ice behind with glacial till around it. The result is a low area which will fill with more or less water depending on the water table. ) In the early 80's the weather had been dry, the potholes shrank, the farmers farmed the dry margins, and they wanted it eligible to be designated as out of production for our production adjustment program (i.e., set-aside/ACR). Now the weather's been wet, the potholes expand, the farmers can't farm the wet margins, and they want it to be eligible for prevented planting payments.
“‘The requirement to be able to bring an insured crop to harvest in one of four years improves program integrity,’ said Administrator Murphy. ‘It also helps to meet the needs of farmers in the Prairie Pothole region, where some acreage has not been available to plant since the 2008 crop year due to flooding and excessive moisture conditions.’”
From the viewpoint of people like Ducks Unlimited, this is all crap. Farmers should not be encouraged to plant around potholes--the land should be in permanent conservation cover because the potholes are indispensable habitat for wildlife. It's the modern version of the sheepmen versus the cattlemen wars of the 19th century.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Erosion, NRCS, andConservation Compliance
What's not clear to me is how much of Iowa is considered to be highly erodible. I remember visiting Sherman County, KS for Infoshare in 1991 and farmers were still bitching about the classification of most of their land as HE.
Saturday, December 04, 2010
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Cover Crops
As far as weeds on organic farms, the biggest help there may also be cover crops, things like rye and fava beans. Many cover crops aren’t seeded at a high enough rate, Dr. Brennan said. “We have five times more weeds in vegetables where cover crop is the accepted rate,” he said. “If we increase the seeding rate by three times, we have virtually no weeds. That’s extremely important because organic farmers have no herbicides.”My first boss at ASCS sent me to North Carolina for a month to see how the state and county offices operated. I remember joining one county executive director on a drive to a local saw mill where for the first time I saw a veneer cutter. At least that's what I'd call it: to describe it I'd say think of a pencil sharpener, except larger and instead of the blade hitting the cylinder of wood (pencil) at an angle it was parallel, so you got an a cylindrical wood shaving about 1/8" thick. Cut the cylinder into strips and you have the materials to weave wooden garden baskets.
Anyhow, what the director was doing was signing people up for conservation practices under the old Agricultural Conservation Program. ASCS would share the costs of things like farm ponds and, in this case, liming fields and sowing a winter cover crop. The Nixon administration battled with Congress trying to end this governmental subsidy program, arguing that USDA was just encouraging farmers to do things which, if economical, they should do themselves. By the mid 70's the program got extensively changed, with liming and cover crops dropped, and eventually it was given to NRCS to run.
The director knew that some of the sawmill workers were farmers who, since it was November and the crops were in, were picking up some money by working at the sawmill. The director had an incentive: the better job he did in signing up farmers to participate, the better he looked in the eyes of the district director and state office. And cover crops and limed fields improved agriculture in his county.
Friday, May 29, 2009
NRCS Gets Dinged
- EWG says they could improve the job they're doing with EQIP in the states in the Mississippi watershed. "We found that, up to now, EQIP has not been deployed as effectively as it could be in these 10 states. The methods used to decide how to spend EQIP dollars within a state and which farmers will get those dollars are more likely to result in diffuse and fragmented efforts to reduce pollution from farms, rather than the focused and coordinated effort needed to clean up the Mississippi River and its tributaries."
- Farmgate reports on a court case USDA lost in Iowa, having to do with the definition of "wetlands" under swampbuster rules:
In his summary of the case, Iowa State’s McEowen says, “So, in essence, USDA harassed the plaintiff with bogus wetland violation claims for many years which placed the plaintiff within the potential peril of bankruptcy and continued to maintain its bogus claims in an attempt to avoid paying the plaintiff’s attorney fees.” He says that is not new, and quotes another case, in which the court said, “…there is no worse statute than one misunderstood by those who interpret it.”
McEowen suggests that USDA should send its staff and attorneys to some wetland education classes, and if courts keep making USDA reimburse land owners for their attorney fees, then USDA may learn what the law is.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
A Puff Piece for NRCS and FSA
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Outstanding Conservationist--Could Her Child Follow?
*"living" defined as a modern life, frugal but with many mod cons, and the possibility of college for the kids.
What the article doesn't say is how many years she's been getting up at 4 a.m. to milk those cows and who's handling the milking while she's gadding about in the big city of St. Paul, MN.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Carrots, Sticks, and Rewarding Conservation
See the Bible and the prodigal son for the resentments this can cause.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Vilsack and Conservation Subsidies
Merriam-Webster says: subsidy=" a grant or gift of money: as a: a sum of money formerly granted by the British Parliament to the crown and raised by special taxation b: money granted by one state to another c: a grant by a government to a private person or company to assist an enterprise deemed advantageous to the public."
So, researchers who get grants to study cancer cures are being "subsidized"? Or Pell grants are "subsidies"?
Technically, the Vilsacks have a contract, it's a quid pro quo. I suppose cancer researchers and Pell grantees also have conditions. I'm not sure what converts the Vilsack's contract into a "subsidy" when a cancer researcher is not normally seen as "subsidized". One might suppose the fact that there's no free market operating, but CRP contracts are competitive, as are NIH grants. (If I recall, there's a bid process where farmers offer land which is evaluated according to criteria as to the relative importance of taking it out of annual crop production.)
I think the bottom line is CRP payments have been tainted by the other payments FSA issues, many of which are more appropriately labeled "subsidies" (i.e., no competition) even though they all are contracts.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Prairie Potholes Vanishing
I'd debate the story title [Updated to clarify--Morgan points the finger at subsidized crop insurance, which is valid, but most people, as did I originally and as did all the comments at Volokh.com, will think first of direct payments], but more importantly I wonder about NRCS and the swampbuster provisions (which make people who drain wetlands ineligible for program benefits). If Morgan is right, either I misunderstand the current situation on wetlands or there's something else going on.
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Transparency in FSA (Recommendations for FSA)
I find it interesting the groups are hesitant about the farm bill--they want a broader consensus about the risks and benefits of reopening the 2008 Farm bill. They also don't provide any tentative cost scoring, nor any ways of possibly getting the money under pay/go financing rules.
My sense is that they're talking a few billion dollars here.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Organic and CRP Land
So the greens might say, if you're getting out of CRP, go organic. But some greens must be a bit ambivalent about the idea, as tilling CRP land would cause a larger carbon footprint. Life is so complicated, it's unfair.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Government Policing Farmers
Now we can anticipate other changes. As my right-wing friends might say, an ever-encroaching government bureaucracy taking away farmers' freedoms. Here's an piece in Mulch, on the problems of controlling run-off pollution in watersheds (a problem already faced in the New York City watershed). The writer struggles to plot a course between purely "voluntary" conservation measures, which aren't that effective, and alternatives, trying to identify alternatives which aren't oppressive. For an old cynic, the struggle is most interesting.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
CRP's Future
Monday, May 05, 2008
Sodsaver Provision
Apparently the conference committee is restricting it to the desert pothole area (i.e., the area of small lakes/marshes left behind when the glaciers retreated that are great for ducks, etc.) and making it optional by the governor. That's much to the regret of conservationists. What concerns a former bureaucrat is the possibility the law will mix apples and oranges. Mostly in the past, eligibility provisions have been either/or, land or person. A person who violated the sod/swampbuster provisions would be ineligible for all payments everywhere. Or, if the program provisions on a farm were violated, there might be no payments for that farm. But this sounds as if it might be a mixture--someone plows grassland in ND and in SD, for example. ND says okay, but SD says no. Result--person is ineligible on all his land in SD but not in ND. Very difficult to control, unless the IT systems FSA uses have gotten considerably more sophisticated.
It's also interesting--under sodbuster NRCS would have to have an approved plan for the farm to make the producer eligible. Sounds to me as if this "sodsaver" provision is a tacit admission that NRCS was unable/unwilling to administer the "sodbuster" provisions as originally intended. No real surprise--NRCS as a bureaucracy did not have the culture of policing regulations.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Conflicting Priorities
Monday, February 11, 2008
South Dakota Swampbuster Case
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Stupid People
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Environmental Quality IMprovement Program Takes a Hit
The questions, then, remain: Why should taxpayers foot the bill for manure lagoons, particularly under the flag of environmental conservation? Why should taxpayers subsidize expansion of livestock farms? And if livestock farms have created environmental problems, shouldn’t the polluters have to pay for the mess that they created, rather than the taxpayers?Just another example of the falling support for farm programs.