Another Pigford Piece

This time the claim is that Sen. Obama will be helped in southern primaries by his stance:

Presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has taken a leading role on a major civil rights issue affecting black farmers that could give him a boost in Democratic primaries in South Carolina and other states in the South.

The issue is the landmark Pigford settlement between historically disenfranchised black farmers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Signed in 1999, the settlement was intended to make up for decades of discrimination in which black farmers were denied USDA loans and credit while white farmers were granted help.

Prudery, as in Mine

Given my upbringing, it's not a surprise to me that I turned out to be a prude. (My wife wants to see the new Vito Mortenson movie, the one with an 8 minute fight scene where he's nude. I'm not enthused.) Although I loosened up on language, the Internet still feels a bit formal to me (that's a combination of words not often seen). And I understand that using profanity can cause the spam filters to trip. So I normally don't.

But here's a chance to recommend a site with two long posts strictly on obscenity, of the excretory kind. I've pushed Dirk Beauregard's site before, and do so again.

New "Safety Net" Program Analysis

The extension people are doing explanations of how the program proposed by Sens. Durbin and Brown to replace loan deficiency and counter-cyclical payments might work. University of Illinois here and Ohio State here.

Without getting into the overall program, the idea of going to state-level prices and yields is interesting. The price support people at FSA have experience with the variation within a state because they set county-level loan rates. But this would create new learning opportunities for my old friends, what few are left, in FSA. The definition of a "farm" will be challenging. (I remember the early 80's when we suddenly switched from worrying about disasters, where the farmer wanted the smallest possible "farm" to maximize the likelihood of a loss to worrying about production adjustment, where the farmer wanted the largest possible "farm" so he had the most leeway on the diverted acreage.

Here Congress would be putting the bulk of payments in a "disaster" context, so small farms will be desired. But the location of a "farm" may become more critical along state lines (unless maybe FSA already has a rule prohibiting combination of land across state lines--to get the farm into a state with more favorable price/yield combination).

And I'm sure the prospect of working more closely with RMA thrills everyone in both agencies. Well, it's early days and we'll see what happens.

We Don't Know What We're Doing

That's my interpretation of the testimony of Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. My logic:

• The surge originally was intended to reverse the momentum which the violence had attained. And to provide space for political process to work.
• The surge succeeded in stopping the violent momentum but the overwhelming impression I got from sporadic viewing of the hearings and reading the paper was the idea that bottom up progress, symbolized by Anbar, was the new hope, something completely unexpected from 6 months ago.
• So, because something good happened for once in Iraq, we're going to probably "go long". (Remember when the discussion before the Baker group's report was: "go big", "go long", "get out". Well, we tried the "go big" (as big as we could without going to a draft, etc.), now Bush is going long.)

The bottom line is we didn't understand Iraq before we invaded, and we still don't understand it. That's not surprising; most of us don't understand our own society. That doesn't mean that I'm necessarily for withdrawing all troops by Dec 2008. George Packer in the New Yorker had a sobering piece last week (yes, I'm running slow in blogging) about which he's now blogging.

Gee I Wish I Had Known This Back at USDA

The "Overcoming Bias" blog has lots of good stuff, rather academic though. Today they have two posts on "planning". Or rather, the planning fallacy, because "The planning fallacy is that people think they can plan, ha ha."

Or: "When people are asked for a "realistic" scenario, they envision everything going exactly as planned, with no unexpected delays or unforeseen catastrophes - the same vision as their "best case".

Reality, it turns out, usually delivers results somewhat worse than the "worst case".

The advice is: when in the midst of a project, ask your experts for how long it took other similar projects to complete. If I'd done that, I would have skipped involvement in several failed projects, mostly attempting to cross bureaucratic lines (or merge "stovepipes").

EU Set-Aside

In a blast from the past, this agweb article referred to a proposal to reduce the EU set-aside from 10 percent to 0. This was new to me--I thought the EU and the US had done away with production adjustment. On doing a very little research it looks as if it was a cross between the US "Conservation reserve Program" and the annual set-aside programs we had at times in the 1970's-1990's. Like CRP in that the 10 percent level was "permanent" (as of 1999) and not changeable from year to year. Except now it's proposed to be changed. $8 wheat futures will do that to you.

A-10 and Tactical Air Redux--UAV Responsibility

The services are fighting over unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and whether the Air Force should be responsible for them, according to this interesting piece in Government Executive. It carries echoes of past battles over military aviation (should the Marines have their own air force, should the Navy, etc.), tactical aviation, the continuation of the A-10, etc. etc.

A footnote in an era when good government types are blasting earmarks--Sen Shelby, whose state has a big Army UAV post, is fighting to protect it by inserting language in the appropriations bill. Is this a negative earmark? (Doesn't "earmark" originally go back to notching the ears of cattle to assert ownership? )

Another Locavore Experiment

Here is a piece in New York about a guy in Brooklyn who tried to raise enough food for a month on 800 square feet. Here's one of the concluding paragraphs:

In three weeks of eating nothing but Farm-fresh food, I lost 29 pounds, down from my pre-Farm weight of 234. Abs: That’s the upside of only two meals a day. The downside is the expense. Not counting my own labor, which was unending, I spent about $11,000 to produce what, all told, is barely enough to feed one grown man for a month. But I did learn something about food: Unless you really know what you’re doing, raising it is miserable, soul-crushing work. Eating food fresh from the farm, on the other hand, is delightful.

I roared at some of his misadventures (the idea that a hen finds eggs delicious struck home) and agree with his conclusions. (Although even when you know what you're doing, some of farming is miserable, soul-crushing work. Of course, that's also true of teaching, and writing, and bureaucracy.)

Coordination of Bureaucracies

The LA Times has a story on modern day coordination of military arms. (See my piece on WWII.) Basically it's a technological solution--a kit that enables remote replication of a computer monitor (think of the Slingbox which allows similar functionality for TV). Apparently the voice communications linkage was pre-existing, what the hero of the piece did was push engineers to replicate monitors of Predator operators--essentially allow one to look over their shoulder.

I've not tried it out, but apparently Microsoft has similar capability in PC's running XP or Vista. Seems like a security risk, but the coordination is worthwhile.

Johanns and Pigford

From a piece in The Hill

Johanns on Tuesday told reporters that members of Congress were “justifiably” upset about an e-mail that called on Farm Service Agency (FSA) employees to lobby against the language. He said such lobbying would violate USDA rules prohibiting grassroots lobbying by employees.

“I must admit, it’s painful for me that we have an e-mail out there that advocated a given position,” Johanns said Tuesday. “That really upset Congress, and I don’t want that to jeopardize what has been a very positive view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and what we can offer in the policy debate.”