FArm Bill Status

This post seems a good summary of the status of the farm bill while our neighbors to the north still support supply management. I'm not clear on what all crops are supply managed (i.e., have quotas as our tobacco and peanut crops used to, or diversion/set-aside/acr production adjustment as our big 8 field crops had until 1996). So I went googling and found this summary. Because it's wrong in my unhumble opinion about US agriculture, take it with a grain of salt, but it's an interesting contrast.

[Updated--And then there's the EU, where the minister is bragging that she got her rules for 2008 (no set-aside and suspending import duties) in place. (She doesn't note that US wheat farmers are planting winter wheat with no program in place. She could.)]

Modern Dairies

The Wisconsin virtual dairy tour is here--(note--the link gives you an overview). There's a wide variety of farming operations, with a variety of legal mechanisms, but they almost all seem to be what I would call "family farms". Huge, some of them, and obviously reliant on hired help, but as long as a husband/wife or siblings run the operation and one family lives on the farm, I think they qualify.

The Role of the Media

Here's a piece from Government Executive, on a speech by Hayden:

"CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said he has "very deep respect for journalists and for their profession." But then he devoted a healthy chunk of his address to critiquing media coverage of the agency.

"Just as they report on the terrorists, it's the job of journalists to report on how the war against terrorism is being fought," Hayden said. "And when their spotlight is cast on intelligence activities, sound judgment and a thorough understanding of all the equities at play are critically important. Revelations of sources and methods, or what seems to me to be an impulse to drag anything CIA does to the darkest corner of the room, can make it very difficult for us to do our vital work."

I think the bureaucrats in many places would have similar complaints: Journalists don't understand the ins and outs, skip over the necessary tradeoffs, and focus and dragging things to "the darkest corner of the room". Is there an answer? No.

And Peanuts Are Moving

There was a newspiece a while back about new farmers producing tobacco (i.e, in southern Illinois) under contract with companies. I blogged on it here. And the dairy farms are going out, or hiring immigrant labor to work the 15 hour days. (Actually, that's a lie--dairy farmers just want your sympathy. They don't actually work 15 hours every day. Their workday ends 15 hours or so after it begins, but there's down time and meal time in between. Another reminder: don't trust anyone.)

And now the peanut farms are moving, from Whitesboro (NE Texas on the OKlahoma border) to west Texas, according to this lament.It seems to be a pattern similar to that for tobacco--the old FSA quota program effectively locked in the farms that were growing the crop. End the program, or replace it with a nonquota program, and different farmers in different areas will grow the crop. In the lingo of the economists, it's "creative destruction". In the memories of the people, it's a lost heritage.

A sidenote: both the peanut piece and the dairy post previous refer to horses coming in. I guess all the rich yuppies with their ranchettes also want their own saddle horse? Trying to recapture the heritage of the cowboys (or the Plains Indians)?

Again on Dairy Farming

As the man says, "you're essentially married to your cows". And it's a 15-hour day, week in, week out. For those reasons, the Poconos are losing dairy farms according to this piece.

Cash Lease, Share Lease, Allocating Risk

A USDA press release of Friday:

The Agriculture Department today announced that it has issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking seeking public comment on the treatment of lease agreements under various USDA programs. Mark Keenum, USDA's under secretary for farm and foreign, Agricultural Services, said "by reviewing our current rules, we hope to provide producers with the ability to adjust their lease agreements to take advantage of changing market conditions while also letting USDA have the controls needed to ensure that program integrity is maintained as required by applicable statutes."

At issue is whether regulations governing whether a lease is considered "cash-rent" or "share-rent" for a USDA program purpose need to be revised or defined more specifically. The goal is to solicit comments on the feasibility of USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA) and Risk Management Agency (RMA) establishing a standardized treatment of leases containing variable or flexible provisions under the programs administered by those agencies.

I personally suspect the resolution will be like the long-time concern over FSA and RSA having different crop reporting dates. As far as I know, the differences have not all been resolved. I think crop insurance requires an "insurable interest" while FSA requires a "producer" to be someone who shares in the crop, or the risk of producing the crop (except for people like seed corn producers).

A Quiet Suburban Morning

Coming back from Starbucks and the garden: a beautiful early fall day, temp in the 60's, clear blue sky, sun dappling the woods.

(An aside--is it just me or is the "dappling effect" more pronounced in the fall. I'd speculate that the trees grow to intercept the maximum sunlight, which means during the summer. As the sun gets lower in the sky in the autumn, its rays come in at a greater angle, thus finding gaps in the leaf coverage that weren't present when the rays were coming more perpendicular. (That's me, always wanting to have an answer and show it off.))

Suddenly an animal dashed across Glade Drive, coming from the condo cluster on the right to the houses on the left. About halfway across the street, I identified it: a fox. A skinny fox, running faster and more intelligently than the squirrels who often cross the roads, sometimes only partway.

The fox ran to the edge of the backyard of the house on the corner--it backs to a patch of woods running up to the community swimming pool and which separates my townhouse cluster from the streets of houses. For some reason the house's owners have a faux outhouse standing at the edge of the lawn, yuppie humor I guess. The outhouse was in the sun and the fox settled there.

And the fox scratched. And scratched. And scratched.

I must have stood watching for 5 minutes as the fox tried to conquer his fleas. I guess his paws were ineffective weapons against his enemies.

The Human Animal, as Seen by Today's Times

From Joseph Nocera on how even Nobel-winning economists aren't rational investors:

Having watched the way investors have behaved since the Crash of ‘87, I’ve come to believe that most human beings are simply not hard-wired to be good investors.

On changes at Macy's (dropping coupons and upscaling lines):

But the changes amounted to “too much, too fast,” Mr. Lundgren acknowledged in an interview. It turns out that men, in particular, are creatures of shopping habit. They want to go to the local department store and find the Dockers where they have always been. [Duh]

From a front pager on what happens to small trusts when the original people are not around and big banks and law firms take over:

With no family members to encourage gifts to the original donor’s favorite causes, the banks and lawyers have wide latitude to change the way the trusts operate and to decide which charities will receive grants.

Banks can reduce gifts and increase the foundation’s assets, thus increasing their fees. At the same time, banks and lawyers stand to gain personal influence and prestige by selecting new charities.

Happiness and Homemaking

David Leonhardt in the Times reports on studies of happiness:

Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

These trends are reminiscent of the idea of “the second shift,” the name of a 1989 book by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, arguing that modern women effectively had to hold down two jobs. The first shift was at the office, and the second at home.

But researchers who have looked at time-use data say the second-shift theory misses an important detail. Women are not actually working more than they were 30 or 40 years ago. They are instead doing different kinds of work. They’re spending more time on paid work and less on cleaning and cooking.

This fits with several other posts. We've turned to fast food and eating out, not because people schemed to force feed us with bad food, but because it was fast, convenient, and saved time for doing other things that "we" (i.e, women) wanted to do. It doesn't hurt that sugary and fat food tastes good and the typical fast food meal tastes better than much of the home-cooked food of the 1940's and 50's. After all, specialization means that someone can learn to do things well. And in our market economy if one can earn money and buy a million-dollar house by selling food through franchises, there's nothing wrong with that. (There is, but that's another subject.)

The Future of Rural America

I've posted recently on the process by which rural America loses population--young people migrate elsewhere for more opportunity, so few babies are born, and older people die. Here's a study that claims that the migration is two-way--the young and educated leave, the poor and less educated migrate in, attracted by the lower cost of living (all those homes built for many big families depress the housing market).

[Updated--see here for a discussion of "rural".]