Forgiveness

The Religion Writer has a post discussing the Amish, the shooting at the school, and the relationship of forgiveness and 9/11. Also refers to the new Donald Kraybill book on the subject. I liked his previous book, which gave me enough knowledge of the Amish to be able to use them as a comparison to mainstream society.

For example, when the locavores praise local agriculture, I can think of the Amish and say, yes, but. There's tradeoffs and there's tradeoffs. Do I, proud progeny of a line of teachers and preachers, really like the idea of ending school at the eighth grade?

And forgiveness--I admire the way they dealt with the blow. (Of course, the wounded got good medical care that depended on advanced schooling.) But do I really want to be that forgiving?

Questions--no answers.

Pigford Again--the Lawyers Relief Act

MK, faithful reader, points me to this post, describing the current state of play on the Pigford provision in the new farm bill. The major issue seems to be estimating the number of claims that will be filed and will ultimately succeed and what the dollar amount of those settlements will be.

Only a cynic would note this sentence: "In contrast [to the prior legislation], the House farm bill would allow late-filing Pigford claimants to file a civil action, where claimants are unlikely to have the same success rate...." Why might it be noteworthy? What do you need to file a "civil action"? A lawyer. How does a lawyer get paid? Presumably (based my extensive legal education reading John Grisham and Scott Turow) on a contingency basis--a third or a half. So this provision might be providing, depending on whose estimate turns out to be right, from $33 million to $1.5 billion for underpaid lawyers.

What Do We Expect of Government Employees?

I'm prompted by a scattering of factoids in today's press, which I won't even bother to link to.

• Item. GAO reports some government bureaucrats are flying business/first class. (One being a deputy assistant undersecretary for USDA (those job titles keep getting longer).)
• Item. A mention of the starting salaries for law school grads ($160K).(More than all but a few federal employees.)
  
• Item. Blackwater head defends his employees, who earn multiples of what the retired Gen. Pace did, in front of Congress.
• Item. NYTimes has a diagram showing the "old boy network" (my terminology) of how the up and coming wheeler dealers in finance relate by school ties (clue Harvard Law and MBA and undergrad, Yale, and the other usual prospects).

I guess the lesson is, government employees give stable service for middle of the road benefits. If you want the big bucks, and the comfortable seats, you have to take the risks inherent in being part of an old-boy network.

Old Structures and New Trends

A post on Grist attacking the new crop insurance pilot program, whereby farmers cut their premiums if they use certain Monsanto seed corn led me to interesting testimony before Congress on problems with crop insurance here.
Scott Marlowe is apparently based in North Carolina and makes interesting points:

"The fastest growing segments of North Carolina’s farm economy - livestock produced under
production contracts, specialty crops like greenhouse, nursery and Christmas trees, and emerging value-added markets such as organic and specialty livestock - are all underserved, if served at all, by current crop insurance programs. We are moving rapidly from crops with extensive risk management and disaster programs to enterprises with ineffective or no risk management."

"The challenge for crop insurance is that the emerging markets and differentiated products do not come with the uniformity and automatic data collection that provides the underpinning of conventional commodity crop insurance. The very aspects of these markets that make them vibrant and exciting and profitable – the ability to respond quickly to a wide variety of specific niches of quality and production – are the same aspects that make it extremely difficult to program for them. The traditional product development approach of developing a crop specific
risk profile and then releasing a crop-specific insurance product is unable to address the diversity of emerging products, enterprises and markets."

Organic producers pay a 5 percent surcharge for crop insurance, but get coverage at conventional prices, not the premium prices they can command.

I wonder--will private insurers independent of RMA fill these gaps, as free-marketers would expect, or does the RMA/private colossus preempt such innovation?

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).