Smaller Markets--Good or Bad?

The LA Times has an article on Safeway's trying a new, smaller market design (along with Wal-mart and Tesco). It sounds as if they might be going for both the crunchies and the rushies-

"The new smaller stores are attempting to offer convenience by editing down the selection to fewer product choices in each category and making it easier for people to do their shopping and get out. The stores offer a large selection of prepared foods and meals that can be quickly assembled by time-pressed households.

"About 50% of the offerings are fresh produce, meats, cheese and prepared foods."

A Plague of Senility--P. Noonan?

A line from her column, as quoted in volokh.com by Orin Kerr: " Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity [patrimony] of 40 years."

I take this as comforting news that even a relative whippersnapper like Peggy Noonan (and a fine writer, if distressingly conservative) has her little senior moments.

Hate Them Blind Allies

David Brooks reports on an interview with Obama, in which he admires George H.W.Bush's diplomacy and cautions groups against the "blind ally" of terrorist activity. "Ally" is how it was printed in my NYTimes this morning--it's been corrected in the on-line version.

But the concept of a blind ally is intriguing. Less so is the idea that Brooks is getting old and prone to typpos--he should leave that to his seniors, like me.

Horses Are the Answer

So what's the question? Why we've gone to highly specialized agriculture over the last 60 years (according to ERS farms producing the most usually produce only one commodity)?

This study shows that a 3 and 4 year rotation using low inputs of synthetic fertilizer can beat the yields of a 2-year corn/soybean rotation. (Not organic, but low input.)

Great news, but what's the problem?

The problem is where's the market for the small grains and clover or alfalfa that are produced in the third and fourth year. In the good old days (and on Amish farms), the answer was horses--they'd eat the oats and hay. In the bad new days, no horses.

Pollan's Thesis Takes a Hit

One of Michael Pollan's arguments in "In Defense of Food" against what he calls nutritionism is that idea that, since the 1970's, our health has declined even as nutritionists have had more influence over what we eat. A report in Wednesday's Washington Post seems to counter that position:

The difference in death rates between highly educated and poorly educated people in the United States is very wide and growing wider, according to new research.

For Americans with less than a high school education, the risk of dying prematurely is on the increase -- rising most quickly for white women in that category. In contrast, the risk of premature death among college graduates is falling -- fastest of all for black men.

It's true that much of the decline is due to changes in life-style (i.e, no smoking) but it certainly doesn't support the idea the health of educated, monied people (the ones who buy Pollan's books) is declining. And here's the CBO's take on the issue

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.