In other policy related news, Rick Barrett reported on Sunday at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online that, “Thirsty for milk, and the money that comes with it, South Dakota has ramped up efforts to recruit dairy farmers from other states and countries, including England, Ireland and The Netherlands.
The Agriculture Department, for example, has been improving and standardizing the look and feel of all the department’s websites by hosting monthly webmaster meetings. The Labor Department is building a knowledge management program that integrates data from its 25 agencies and call centers, including answers to the most frequently asked questions, with the aim of building a cohesive customer experience.Thanksgiving has made me cynical: how is "digital governance" different from "e-government" which was in turn different from "IT management" which was in turn different from "ADP operations"?
Russia has almost 300 million acres of arable land, about 50 million acres of which require time to recover after being out of service for some time. The minimum yield is about 1 ton per acre, which by European standards is next to nothing.
Therefore, even assuming minimum yields on all of the 300 million acres of arable lands, Russian land can produce 300 million tons of crops annually, with cereals accounting for two-thirds of the total. This means that Russia is capable of producing 200 million tons of grain annually.
With domestic consumption at around 80 million tons a year, Russia would have more than 100 million tons of spare grain that could be exported. To compare: Last season, the United States – the global leader in grain exports – exported 73 million tons of grain, with Argentina ranking second at 32 million tons. Australia and Ukraine each exported 24 million tons of grain, while Russia and Canada sold 20 million tons.
Scorching drought and rising demand across the globe have pushed the price of U.S. food exports to record highs this year.I may be wrong, but it seems to me the days of the government donating surplus CCC inventory were gone long before recent price rises.
That is good news for American farmers. But it’s bad news for the hungry, especially on the eve of the holiday season.
The booming market means that the federal government does not need to buy as many excess crops from farmers, resulting in a precipitous drop in government donations to food banks.
"the federal government must invest but reform. The federal government largely remains a legacy government rooted in a different era. Existing federal agencies and programs are siloed and stove-piped in their structure and prescriptive and technocratic in their approach. The proliferation of redundant federal programs is particularly alarming.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83995_Page2.html#ixzz2ChTGlcv7Meanwhile somewhere I read a piece giving advice to all the new appointees to be in the executive branch. One warning was: don't reorganize, it will sop up all your time and energy so you can't do anything else.
There's little logic to the position unless she thinks, incorrectly, that the higher bracket applies to all earnings, not just the incremental gains over $250,000. I hope they have a tax accountant who can advise them better.Kristina Collins, a chiropractor in McLean, Va., said she and her husband planned to closely monitor the business income from their joint practice to avoid crossing the income threshold for higher taxes outlined by President Obama on earnings above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.Ms. Collins said she felt torn by being near the cutoff line and disappointed that federal tax policy was providing a disincentive to keep expanding a business she founded in 1998.“If we’re really close and it’s near the end-year, maybe we’ll just close down for a while and go on vacation,” she said.
“Some 100 California dairy farmers are shutting their doors this year, according to the Milk Producers Council, a group representing dairy farmers. Many of the state’s roughly 1,600 dairy farms are wrestling with financial difficulties. And many farmers point their finger at California’s ‘Class 4b’ milk regulation, which governs the prices cheese makers pay,” the Journal article said.When I was growing up, the small poultrymen were being put out of business by vertical integration and contract growing. I don't know what has happened to egg prices over the last 50 years, but I assume they've been more stable since supply has been more regulated/coordinated. I guess that sort of revamping of the dairy industry isn't quite as practical: too much capital involved perhaps.
"FEMA has 9,106 disaster assistance employees. Only 770 get federal health insurance."
But John Ameroso, the Johnny Appleseed of the New York community garden movement, suspects that the number of present-day gardens — around 800 — may be half what it was in the mid-1980s.Seems to me the article undermines any assumption there's a long waiting list for urban garden plots in the city, some areas have waiting lists, some don't. The enthusiasm for gardening is similar to other enthusiasms, sometimes hot, sometimes cold. It's not a firm foundation for redoing the basis on which America grows its food.
In his long career as an urban extension agent for Cornell University, Mr. Ameroso, 67, kept a log with ratings of all the plots he visited. “I remember that there were a lot of gardens that were not in use or minimally used,” he said. “Into the later ’80s, a lot of these disappeared or were abandoned. Or maybe there was one person working them. If nothing was developed on them, they just got overgrown.”
Milk, by itself, somehow saved lives. This is odd, because milk is just food, just one source of nutrients and calories among many others. It's not medicine. But there was a time in human history when our diet and environment conspired to create conditions that mimicked those of a disease epidemic. Milk, in such circumstances, may well have performed the function of a life-saving drug.You can't be a dairy farmer and deny evolution.
"Sometimes, after an outlandish request—a character whose minuscule limbs simply won’t support a body, say—Carmy’s colleagues have to gently explain that different rules exist for physical product design. “We have gravity, for example,” she says."
Americans have been eating genetically engineered food for 18 years, and as supporters of the technology are quick to point out, we don’t seem to be dropping like flies. But they miss the point. The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends.Am I being unfair to summarize it as saying: "it's not a health issue, it's power"--even though there's no food safety issue, we, the food movement, need to show our power? Would the professor like to see other movements use the same logic; don't argue the merits, just show you're more powerful than your opponent?
About 870 million people are estimated to have been undernourished in the period 2010–12. This represents 12.5 percent of the global population, or one in eight people. The vast majority of these – 852 million – live in developing countries, where the prevalence of undernourishment is now estimated at 14.9 percent of the population (Figure, below left). Undernourishment in the world is unacceptably high.The updated figures emerging as a result of improvements in data and the methodology FAO uses to calculate its undernourishment indicator suggest that the number of undernourished people in the world declined more steeply than previously estimated until 2007, although the rate of decline has slowed thereafter(Figure, below left). As a result, the developing world as a whole is much closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of reducing by half the percentage of people suffering from chronic hunger by 2015. If the average annual decline of the past 20 years continues through to 2015, the prevalence of undernourishment in the developing country regions would reach 12.5 percent – still above the MDG target, but much closer to it than previously estimated
