Locavore versus Organic Dairying

I found this quote from the U of Wisconsin organic farming site amusing:

"On average, Wisconsin’s organic dairies appear to be financially competitive with those in other states. Net returns on organic dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota are similar. And—largely due to higher feed costs in New England—organic farms in the northeastern United States are, on average, not competitive with any type of Wisconsin dairy farm, despite higher organic milk prices in the northeast.

Of course, it doesn't mean that NE dairies will always be non-competitive, particularly if oil prices stay high, but it does indicate some of the complexities in the locavore movement.

Pricey Farm Programs

The U.S. has fallen way behind. With the weakening of the dollar, the Europeans farm programs are way ahead of ours. 34 billion euros works out to $55 billion a year or so at current exchange rates. And their tariffs add a whole lot more. See this letter from GBritain's Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Food, Farming and New Yorker

Bee Wilson in this week's New Yorker reviews several books on food supply:

"[Paul] Roberts’s book [The End of Food] is joined by “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” by Raj Patel (Melville House; $19.95); “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood,” by Taras Grescoe (Bloomsbury; $24.99); and “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” by Michael Pollan, the poet of the group (Penguin Press; $21.95).
All of these authors agree that the entire system of Western food production is in need of radical change, right down to the spinach."

It's not a pretty picture:

"Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market...."

"Roberts depicts the global food market as a lumbering beast, organized on such a monolithic scale that it cannot adapt to the consequences of its own distortions. In a flexible, responsive market, producers ought to be able to react to a surplus of one thing by switching to making another thing. Industrial agriculture doesn’t work like this...."

"The food economy has created a system in which some have no food options at all and some have too many options, albeit of a somewhat spurious kind. In the middle is a bottleneck—a relatively small number of wholesalers and buyers who largely determine what the starving farmers produce and what the stuffed consumers eat."

Needless to say, I don't agree.

Scotch-Irish and Elections

The conventional wisdom seems to be encapsulated in this post by Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo--Sen. Clinton does well in Appalachia, which is a white, poor, underdeveloped portion of the country, settled by Scots-Irish, that was strongly anti-slavery and anti-black in ante-bellum America and retains those beliefs today.

But there's a paradox--when you go to this site, of the U.S.Census, you get a long comparison of Scotch-Irish (apparently the Census' preferred term) with U.S. statistics. There you find that those people who identify themselves as Scotch-Irish are older and white (so far fitting the conventional wisdom for Appalachia) but they're also significantly better educated and wealthier than the average for the country. (Like 20 percent wealthier and 30 percent better educated and more managerial/professional and less agriculture and mining.)

I don't know how one explains the paradox, except by saying those of us who left Appalachia did very very well, those of us who stayed did very very poorly.

"Rootless Americans"

I ran across that term in this post on The Edge of the American West: "Our natural condition, as Americans, is rootlessness — immigration, internal migration, the “melting pot”.

It may be true, but it's easy for academics to overemphasize. Academics are probably the most mobile workers in the country (except for the military) so it would be easy for them judge the world by themselves. In researching genealogy I've seen a lot of stability (except for my grandfather, the Presbyterian minister). And most movements seem to have been either in company with friends, relatives, co-religionists or to areas where the same were already located.

There's an interesting map I forgot to link to showing the counties where Sen. Clinton has done well--it also corresponds to a map of where the Scots-Irish settled 200 years ago.

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.