Profitability for Dairies

This study challenges claims that grazing is cheaper than feeding:

"The ERS-USDA data are inconsistent with conclusions highlighted in an article [link added]
appearing in the summer 2006 issue of The College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
Quarterly. The article, which discusses a report authored by Tom Kriegl and Ruth
McNair (K&M) entitled, “Pastures of Plenty”, states that managed grazing techniques, such as rotational grazing, result in lower costs of production per hundredweight for dairies. These conclusions are based on farm-level records data for the years of 2001 and 2002, while the ERS-USDA data in Table 1 are for 2000. These differences in the years when the analyses were performed could explain why there are some differences in the ways the costs for grazing operations compare to the costs of production for conventional dairy farms.
The major difference between the costs reported by ERS-USDA and those underlying the conclusions of the other study relates to labor. The ERS-USDA data include measures of labor costs but the other analysis of grazing dairies presents neither estimates of labor costs nor measures of the quantities of labor used on dairies. This lack of labor information in the K&M study is important because it means this study gives no evidence of whether in fact grazing results in lower total costs of production. In contrast, the ERSUSDA dairy data gives a more complete accounting of the costs of conventional and grass-based dairy systems which includes labor costs."

Apparently, I grew up on a continuous grazing dairy farm--i.e., the cows were on pasture all the time the grass was growing (though we did turn them into the hay fields after harvesting hay). A rotational grazing plan divides the pasture into paddocks and moves the cows among paddocks every 3 days. In the Wisconsin study, they had to get 30 percent of forage by this. (A reminder that cows in northern states must be fed hay and grain a good part of the year. Nothing like coming from 0 degrees into the barn.

I may have stumbled into a duel between rival economists (regression analyses at 10 paces) but it's a reminder of the complexity of an economic analysis.

Sneaky Congress and Public Info

Ken Cook reports those sneaky Congress people put a provision in the conference report trying to overrule the release of acreage report data from FSA.

The Young Are Smarter Than Us

From Slate, Emily Yoffe on procrastination:

At least my daughter has broken my family legacy. When she comes home, she does her homework and practices her piano. I never nag her. How does she do it? She said it was something she learned in the Sunshine class, when she was 4 years old. "The teachers would hand out snacks: five pieces of popcorn, five gummy bears, and five pretzels. Everyone ate what they liked first, then they weren't happy. But I liked the pretzels best, and I realized if I saved them for last, I'd get the taste of them in my mouth the longest. So now, if I can get my homework done, then I have the rest of my night to do whatever I want."

There it was—she didn't need online support, Post-it notes, or the unschedule. She figured it out in nursery school: Save the pretzels for last. Which reminds me that I'm kind of hungry, and it's time for a break. I'd like some pretzels, and I'd like them right now.

Dan Barber on Food--Meet Adam Smith

Dan Barber has a piece in the NYTimes Week in Review section on "Change We Can Stomach". Mr. Barber is a chef at two restaurants. As is often the case, I take exception (my snark in brackets):

"...small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. "[Snark--yes, and a 1-acre farm will probably do $5,000 and a half-acre farm will do $12,000. His argument fails because he's comparing apples and oranges. A 4-acre farm isn't growing field corn, it's growing truck crops. That said, while a smaller farm growing the same crops might be more profitable, I'd bet it would be because of greater intensity of inputs--i.e. more hours per acres.]

"To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a nostalgic bid to revert to the agrarian ways of our ancestors. It is to look toward the future, leapfrogging past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms that take advantage of the sun’s free energy and use the waste of one species as food for another." [Snark--Dan Barber, meet Adam Smith. Believe it or not, right after WWII we didn't have heavy machinery and pollution and we had farms that were diversified and used the waste of one species as food for another. I shoveled lots of that manure. The advantages of specialization work on the farm just as much as in the restaurant--a great chef can outcook my mother 7 days a week without breaking a sweat.]

"With a less energy-intensive food system in place, we will need more muscle power devoted to food production, and more people on the farm." [Absolutely, if you reduce the inputs of capital (i.e. equipment) and supplies (fertilizer, etc.), you have to increase the inputs of labor. That's called sweat equity. You get the sweat equity by importing migrant labor to whom low U.S. wages look high, or importing romantics for whom the sweat perfumes the country air.]

"Truly great cooking — not faddish 1.5-pound rib-eye steaks with butter sauce, but food that has evolved from the world’s thriving peasant cuisines — is based on the correspondence of good farming to a healthy environment and good nutrition. It’s never been any other way, and we should be grateful. The future belongs to the gourmet." [Snark, Hell if it does, not at the prices you charge in your restaurants. Someone living on a 4-acre farm would never pass through the doorway of your restaurant and pay $78 for a dinner. That's over one percent of his net for the year.}

Body Mass--What Are the Tradeoffs

Interesting post by Stu Ellis at Farmgate on causes for food prices to increase.

I wonder--discussions of global food supply always pay attention to numbers of people, with some attention to the demand for better food when incomes increase. I wonder whether anyone has quantified the global human body-mass over time. I see the Latino construction workers laying the FIOS cable in my neighborhood and they're pretty uniformly small. (That's perhaps balanced out by how hard they work.) The Chinese in the 1970's were uniformly small, now they've got Yao Ming et. al. Diets make all the difference and allow differences in genetic endowments to be expressed.

Surely since WWII the average size of humans has increased significantly. If I remember, Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms had some interesting data both on calories available to Westerners over the last 2-300 years and average height, but I don't think he had anything on waistline. Nor do I know how the reduction in physical labor and the increase in calories over the last 70 years fit together. Presumably the bigger the body, the more calories required to do x amount of work. So on a global basis, the per capita work has probably declined, and the per capita body has probably increased. Is it 6 of one, half dozen of the other? Inquiring minds want to know.

Whither Oil and the Dollar?

In the first place, if I knew I wouldn't be wasting my time blogging; I'd be relaxing at the English Country Home my wife wants which I could have bought from my profits.

But I've been skeptical that the current boom in farm crop prices can continue, remembering the lessons of the 1970's.

On the other hand, Kevin Drum (and Paul Krugman) think oil is permanently high. Kevin notes that the government bureaucrats have been predicting oil is at a peak for months. (I thought it'd peaked at $50.) And oil and food are linked, because both are traded in dollars. (And oil is a key input to food production.)

It seems every day you get different messages. Today I saw a post which agrees with my position (i.e., that now is most like the mid-70's) but unfortunately I didn't capture it, so you'll have to take my word for it. The common element of now and the 70's is the devaluation of the dollar--Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard in 1971, I think it was, which made our grain cheap and the world took advantage. This decade the dollar has again gotten dramatically weaker. But here's the ERS study on the rising costs. The author doesn't totally agree with me, but close enough for government work.

(One factor not given much attention in the media is that we've had 2 years in a row of a global food production declines (i.e., bad weather):

"The result of adverse weather in 2007 was a second consecutive drop in
global average yields for grains and oilseeds. In historical perspective, two
sequential years of lower global yields occurred only three other times in the
last 37 years."

Bottom line, I'm still stubbornly holding to a prediction--oil prices and farm prices will both drop by at least 50 percent from current levels over the next years.

A Mother's Day Post

Over at Raising Country Kids, though it's a post by a mother, not to a mother.

Funniest Lines Today

Is from a NYTimes article on a possible defect in hip replacement parts made of ceramic--some users are reporting squeaks when they move:

"'“It can interrupt sex when my wife starts laughing,” said one man, who discussed the matter on the condition that he not be named.'"

A Law Requiring Local Food

A famous (I guess, I never heard of him, but I trust the BBC) British chef says so:

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay says British restaurants should be fined if they serve fruit and vegetables which are not in season. He told the BBC that fruit and vegetables should be locally-sourced and only on menus when in season. Mr Ramsay said he had already spoken to Prime Minister Gordon Brown about outlawing out-of-season produce.

This is called: "pass the ammunition" to your opponents. Via Ann Althouse.

A Presidential Veto of Farm Bill?

That's the promise from the Secretary of Agriculture Schafer and the topic of discussion on the various blogs here and here and here

Now in 1956 President Eisenhower vetoed a farm bill because it provided for high rigid price supports. (The report of the veto wasn't accessible, but the link has Sen. Knowland threatening the veto, which actually happened.) In 1973 Nixon threatened one, and Ford did veto in 1975 (an emergency increase in target prices and supports--he eventually acted administratively in 1976 after firing Earl Butz and seeing defeat looming in the elections). And way back in 1927 Silent Cal vetoed McNary-Haugen. The NY Times archive site is having problems this morning, but the results of the query "farm bill veto" is here.

The process is similar each time--a coalition in Congress (easier to assemble back in the 1920' s when we had more farmers) gets behind legislation to benefit farmers, they go a bridge too far, and the President slaps them down. Of course, often the President threatens a veto but doesn't carry through--I wonder if a political scientist has done a study of that. It's part of the pull and haul of democratic politics.