Farm Bureau Supports FSA

From a news article:

Kevin Paap, president of Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation, who just returned from a trip to Washington, said Farm Bureau has some concerns with payment limits and means testing.

On the other hand, the organization supports switching the administration of farm bill programs to the Farm Service Agency from the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

It makes sense to have those folks who are good at doing administrative stuff do that while having the folks who are good at technical assistance doing that, he said.

I suspect the outcome will depend more on accident and networking, than on logical arguments. You can (at least I can) hear the low level of interest Mr. Papp has in the issue. In the absence of great public concern, and with lobbyists on both sides of the issue, some one person who may feel strongly could sway the outcome. For example, should the Vice President decide to honor his father, who worked for NRCS, that could make a difference.

Farm Bill Cliff Hanger

For the handful of people who care about a piece of legislation, like the farm bill, its progress can be almost as suspenseful as a Harry Potter novel. [I wrote the sentence suspecting I was the first one to put "farm bill" and "Harry Potter" in the same sentence. But I googled, and found 40,000 cases where they're on the same web page. Darn.] All the farm blogs are providing updates on the progress, and we haven't even seen the Senate yet.

NRCS and FSA II

Both sides are going at it, trying to get support for their position on who should hand out the checks for conservation programs. The National Association of Conservation Districts has an "Action Alert" while the National Association of State and County Office Employees has provided a letter to be sent to representatives and is talking to the press. (I have to say, if Congress used the respective web sites to judge which group was more efficient, I'm afraid NACD would win. A Google on "NASCOE" produces this as the first entry: "AllWebCo Website Templates and Pre-Made Websites. Very reasonable prices and a complete setup." (Searching on the full term produces the right result, but it's still incompatible with the Firefox browser.))

NASCOE claims that they have statistics on their side--the percentage of total money spent on administration is much less for FSA programs than NRCS. That factoid sends me off musing about charitable organizations, where oversight groups tend to focus on that percentage. It's not a great measure, but it's about all we have.

The showdown comes this afternoon (and Wed and Thurs).

Cream Puffs and Twinkies

I blogged on the Twinkie Deconstructed book the other day. I've had maybe one Twinkie in my life but I fondly remember my mother's cream puffs. Mom wasn't a good cook but she did do a lot of good baking. Her cream puffs were great--light, with real whipped cream filling.

I'm no baker, and the book is back to the library, so my comparison is top of the head. Mom's cream puff has to taste better than any Twinkie, that is, at least on the evening of the afternoon she made them. Her batches probably ran 8-10, so we never finished them all. (Good Calvinists avoid gluttony.) So we'd finish them the next night. By then the whipped cream had lost its air, the crust of the cream puff was getting stale, and the whole thing was just a sad memory of the glory of the night before.

Thinking about what went into the cream puff--the whipped cream was probably whipping cream from local dairy farms--Crowley's or Dairylea (i.e., "Dairymen's League--the co-op) pasteurized and processed. But it contained vanilla extract, as do Twinkies and perhaps a little powdered sugar. (Vanilla and sugar are two of the chapters in the book tracing the route traveled.) The cream puff itself had flour, milk (ours), sugar, and baking powder. (Baking powder is one of the ingredients from mines--the author get good mileage from following that ingredient from its origin in mines to the shelf.)

So mom's puffs were, in part, the product of industry and manufacturing processes and don't fit comfortably into the concepts of the "slow food" movement. Twinkies, as the book's author makes clear, is that they have to stay fresh on the grocery shelves for weeks, not just last 6 hours in mom's kitchen. That difference requires a lot more science, a lot more additives, more globalizations and a lot more industrial processes. (I've started Bill McKibben's new book and have Barbara Kinsolving's one on hold at the library--I'll be interested to see how strictly they hold to local food.)

FSA's Far-Flung Web of Offices Gets Smaller

From the headline: "Feds plan to close a Farm Service Agency office in Mexico." Among the other six offices being closed are the one for the county in which I grew up. I can understand why--my uncle's (former grandfather's) old farm has houses on it. (One in particular very nice--with a great view looking southwest. As you move west from the Catskills, each range of hills is just a few feet lower than the one before, so the view to the south and west is impressive.) The "big" dairy farmer across the valley from ours has lost its barns and outbuildings and just has a few horses in the pasture. ("Big" was defined in my day as 50+ milking cows being pastured. Now when I visit my sister near Syracuse, the big dairy farms around Tully have several hundred and no pasture.

New Blog

Just what the world needs--another blog. This one is focused on the genealogy of my family, and that of relatives. My cousin pushed me into this (thanks, Marjorie)--see her blog.

Coming This Week

No, not the last Harry Potter, but the full House Ag committee meeting on farm bill. Interesting discussion here.

Interesting Site and Post

I don't think I've noted the Farm Policy blog before. Seems to be mostly summaries of news articles.

And Dan Morgan, who has posted on the blog, has an article in the Post on farm policy, pointing out divisions among Democrats. Do the newcomer Dems support reform, or continuation of the current programs?

Bureaucracies and Measurement

Kevin Drum makes a good point in the health system debate. Because single-payer systems are bureaucracies, they measure things about the health care system, including waiting times for various illnesses/treatments. Their statistics are better than ours (we don't measure waiting times at all). That's no argument to change the system, but it is a warning when we discuss different systems-- we don't have comparable statistics.

Twinkies, Deconstructed

Libertarian economists have an essay floating around the web called "The pencil". It describes all the things and processes that go into the making of a pencil. It's a way of celebrating the free market--Adam Smith's invisible hand coordinates the efforts of people on all the continents to bring forth an ordinary no. 2 pencil

Just read the book: "Twinkie, Deconstructed", which does the same sort of thing for the Twinkie. It's an interesting read, though I got lost at times amidst all the chemicals. The writer isn't a Michael Pollan for style, or for bias against the agri-business-industrial system that provides our processed foods.

What's amazing, and a little disturbing given the recent execution of the top regulator for taking bribes, is the number of chemicals that originate in Chinese plants. Apparently, they do a good job competing in this area--perhaps because the value per pound is so very high. I'm waiting for the conservatives who raised a fuss during the Clinton Administration about Hutchison-Whampoa taking operating facilities in the Panama Canal to realize the insidious invasion taking place on the shelves of grocery stores.