Food Safety, Raw Milk Revisited

Ethicurean has a long post describing the back and forth over a bill to regulate raw milk in California. Now I've mixed feelings on all this. As a retired bureaucrat, I almost always believe there's a role for government regulation. As a long-ago farm boy, I remember the milk inspectors coming and forcing my father to change his operation (install refrigeration for the milk cans), put hot water in the milk house (we had hot water there when we didn't have it in the house), changes not always appreciated. As someone who drank raw milk until college, I liked the taste, but can't take the sometimes quasi-religious fervor mustered on its behalf.

But leaving all that aside, I'm a bit bemused by this thought: suppose a big food processor, a monster multinational corporation, said: we have this brand new product that provides essential minerals and vitamins and tastes great. Oh, we'll promise that it will be almost pure, no more than 10 coliform bacteria per unit.

How far do you think that proposal would get?

Just saying.

The Housing Slump

182 Manassas Drive, Manassas Park, VA recently sold for $105,000. It was appraised in 2007 for $342,000. That's the measure of the housing slump, and the impact of the Prince William crackdown on illegal immigrants.

The Fine Points of History

A comment on my earlier post about biodynamic agriculture challenged my statement that it was an offshoot of organic farming. Indeed, the commenter is reasonably correct. Consulting Wikipedia again and more carefully, and accepting everything said there as gospel (of course), Rudolf Steiner apparently antedated Sir Albert Howard . It's not clear whether they influenced each other or not. I'm more familiar with Louis Bromfield. My mother was converted to organic farming by his books.

Why Doesn't the US Have Bureaucrats Like This?

From an upcoming conference on social media and government, in Canada:

This is not an event put on by the Government of Canada. You can argue with your boss that this will be a highly effective low-cost training opportunity, and if you really need it we can make up a convincing yet completely untruthful conference pamphlet to help make the argument.

This guerrilla action brings a whiff of the old days of bulletin boards (back when 2400 baud was a good speed, not that many people these days know what a "baud" is).

Amish Growth

Organic farming has a future, and its name is "Amish". See this MSNBC piece on their growth, doubling in just a few years.

The Definition of Rich?

When you don't know how many houses you own. From Politico.


To try to give McCain a break, the only thing I could imagine is that he's thinking like a lawyer--how many are in my name, how many in Cindy's name, how many in a trust, how many are some sort of fancy-shmancy rental/purchase arrangement.

Hollowing Out the Center

From Grist, an article on the "hollowing out" of American agriculture--more and more of the production is being done by bigger and bigger operations. Give the writer credit, she finds a big farmer (5,000 acres) who's an individual, not a corporation, to link her piece to.

I don't have that much problem with her piece, except her historical myopia. The trend she cites doesn't date to the 1970's, it goes much further back. My grandfather's hilltop farm in Broome County, NY (proud home of the Farm Bureau, the interest group representing big farmers, all 5 million of them) was the combination of two farms. Handy, when the farmhouse burned, he and his son tore down the deserted one for materials to rebuild the family home. She probably could argue the trend has accelerated this century, I mean last century, over what was happening in the 19th century. But that fact would simply indicate that the cause lies deeper than shortsighted government policies of Nixon and successors, not something that's particularly palatable to the locavore etc. movement.

Words To Bureaucratize By

From FarmPolicy.com, a DTN observation (triggered by the 10-acre rule flap):

"However, the application of extremely complex programs to farming operations that differ widely in their resources and scale and even in their economic objectives will always be a severe challenge. And, as program rules become increasingly complex, the challenge to do so equitably will become even greater, Washington Insider believes.”

The End Is Near--the 10-Acre Rule

Senator Grassley says USDA may be right in how they interpret the legislative language. Must be an omen of some sort.

[Updated--but Rep Peterson says he may have muscled USDA into seeing it his way.]

Republican Scientist Disses Organic

The title is unfair. Just because Nina Fedoroff works for Condi Rice is no reason to call her a Republican. (She's the science adviser to the Secretary of State.) She's interviewed in today's Times and says:

"If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population — maybe half."

I agree, but I suspect many NYTimes readers will not.

Have to give credit to Rice for having such a post.