"Estate"

How come "estate" has two meanings, very opposite in meaning? In the U.S. it means a big old place, or a big old pile of money. In Britain it seems to mean a bunch of poor people in one place, what we might call a [low income] housing project.

On Home-Grown Tomatoes, or the Virtues of Middlemen

I mentioned yesterday our first tomatoes have ripened. Yes, they're tasty, much more so than the store's tomatoes. But, some thoughts:

• One of the problems of growing a garden is feast and famine, you have too many or too few. The first few tomatoes of the year are enjoyable, but we always plant more than we really need, so they can become a burden. (The same goes for zucchini, though more so, at least until the squash beetle lays its eggs.) Or, as my gardening neighbor, a lady from Vietnam was complaining, the chipmunks ate all her beets.
• Because we like regular habits, one way to even out the highs and lows is to draw from multiple sources and multiple areas. (Our peas are long gone, while my cousin in MA just started harvesting hers around the Fourth.) But to do so, requires some overhead--negotiations with farmers, etc. And I don't like to negotiate, nor am I good at it. So leave that stuff for the stores, and accept the idea of less tasty tomatoes as a trade-off.
• I read, probably in the Times or Post, someone whose experience with community-supported-agriculture fits the above. She commented on getting a lot of kale, when kale was in season, with the comment phrased to say, I really got more than I really wanted. Then her CSA went out of business, and she was too lazy or too busy to link up with another.
  

Middlemen, like Arthur Miller's salesman, deserve a bit more respect than they get.

Habits Are 45 Percent of Life? Incredible

That's the factoid buried in a NYTimes story on the importance of habits in everyday life, and how big companies manage to instill new habits in the American consumer. The thrust, though, is the importance of developing new habits in developing countries, such as the habit of washing one's hands after using the toilet. (I'm disappointed there was no comparison of the relative difficulties of teaching this habit in Ghana, versus in hospitals to doctors.) The discussion of the manipulation is disturbing, but the need for positive habits is unquestionable, which makes the story very interesting.

I find the factoid incredible, because about 95 percent of my life is habit.

A Good Book

Nicholas Kristof highlights the Greg Mortenson book in today's Times. I should have blogged about it when I read it, if I didn't. Mortenson turned a failure at mountain climbing into a success at building schools in the mountains of Pakistan/Afghanistan. Inspiring and down to earth. The book runs the danger of being saccharine, but it's not.

Corn Growers Fight Back on Ethanol

Amidst the tides of public opinion, which wash back and forth over the landscape, why do the Iowa corn growers remind me of King Canute? According to Brownfield, they've upped their assessment in order to fight for corn-based ethanol.

First Tomatoes

Okay, with that title you expect a paean to the pleasures of eating the first-home grown tomatoes of the year. Consider it done.

Farm Workers, from ERS

A summary paragraph from the new ERS publication on farmworkers:

What Did the Study Find?
• In 2006, an average 1.01 million hired farmworkers made up a third of the estimated 3 million people employed in agriculture. The other 2.05 million included self-employed farmers and their unpaid family members.
• Productivity gains have gradually reduced the total agricultural labor force and the number of hired farmworkers within it.
• Expanding nonfarm economic opportunities for farmers and their family members have increased farmers’ reliance on hired farm labor.
• Despite new patterns of Hispanic population settlement in rural areas, the geographic distribution of farmworkers has not changed significantly in the past decade. California, Florida, Texas, Washington, Oregon, and North Carolina account for half of all hired and contracted farmworkers.
• Hired farmworkers are disadvantaged in the labor market relative to most other U.S. wage and salary workers. On average, hired farmworkers are younger, less educated, more likely to be foreign-born, less likely to speak English, and less likely to be U.S. citizens or to have a legally authorized work permit.
• According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), which offers the most precise data available on farmworker legal status, half of all hired crop farmworkers lack legal authorization to work in the United States.

Bio Fuels

On the one hand, USDA is being pressured to release the Conservation Reserve Program acreage for growing annual crops, on another there's pressure to roll back the ethanol mandates/subsidy, and on a third there's discussion of converting to cellulosic ethanol. But, as this Slate article says, there's tradeoffs. Every acre of land on the face of the earth has a current use. If you want to change the use, you trade off one thing for another: it may be food for fuel, it may be greenhouse gases versus carbon traps, it may be wilderness versus cultivation, but there's always trade offs.

FSA's Mood

The head of the Iowa FSA office says FSA is under pressure, because Iowa farmers are under extreme pressure. (I remember the PIK days of 1983 when farmers were going bust because the bubble of the 70's had burst and ASCS was trying to run a new program as a bailout measure.)

NAIS and Veggies

From a Post editorial in reference to the salmonella problem:

"Ms. DeGette points out that the technology exists to trace food and produce from the farm to the dinner table. It's time that Congress put that technology to work to protect the food supply."

In that context, it's hard for those who oppose the NAIS to gain traction.

As a followup, Nextstep cautions Congress on trying to mandate technological fixes.