Professional Verus Romantics

I liked this post from Musings of a STonehead. Probably because he finds some romanticism in his customers for weaner pigs who are put off by his professional, if small-scale, approach to his business.

IRS IT Systems

A report from Next Gov on IRS progress with IT systems:

Several issues, however, could pose challenges to the project in the long term. For example, while the goal is for CADE to house all taxpayer information permanently, the system stores the data used to process returns only for the current year. Historical taxpayer account data, such as prior year tax assessments and outstanding tax liabilities, are maintained in a separate database not compatible with CADE's format.

In addition, CADE is approaching maximum capacity in terms of data storage. With the expectation that the taxpayer population will increase significantly, the IRS must decide whether to reduce CADE capabilities, or invest in new technology or alternative resources to satisfy demand, the IG recommended.

Without knowing anything about it, I can give IRS a break on the first issue--"backward compatibility" is always an issue when you do a new system, and not always desirable. Presumably over time the problem will be resolved as the current year's data migrates to the prior year, etc. But the second issue--that's a problem. With costs of storage always dropping, the problem has to be in the software. Granted that you always want more (designing software is like a country boy going to a mall for the first time--you keep seeing more and more possibilities) but after this many years of designing systems we ought to be able to do better estimating.

Milk, Fish, and Derivatives

No, not a menu, just a linking of three stories today.
Milk-
the Chinese continue to struggle with their milk scandal--dairies putting melamine in milk to boost the protein count. Problems of this sort remind of the government milk inspector who used to visit our farm. And also of Thoreau's famous quote on circumstantial evidence: "as when there's a trout in the milk" was good evidence the farmer had been adding water to the milk.

Fish-
the Times reports on a study that: "Giving people ownership rights in marine fisheries can halt or even reverse catastrophic declines in commercial stocks, researchers in California and Hawaii are reporting." Who "gives" the rights? The government.

Derivatives are linked to this week's financial problems.

The point I'd make is government has a role in establishing and enforcing rules, rules of identity (what is milk), rules of property (who owns what right). Our history is government is usually tail-end charley, people discover something new, crisis happens, and sometime later government comes along to establish rules.

Why Farming Is Hard

You have to send your wife out to work to get health insurance benefits, and when you're laid up, you are limited to dial-up access to the Internet. Those aren't quite the hardships our forefathers faced, but they make it hard for farming to compete in the market for the best talent. Why shouldn't the farm kid go to town? (In the old days, sufficiently long ago, the answer was because town was deadly, but not today.)

Animal Cruelty

I'm not sure this works. PETA did undercover work at a livestock farm in Iowa, released the film, and Iowa farmers are fighting back. But it's intrinsically one-sided. PETA can pick and choose what's released. It's also true, as a general rule, what an insider sees in the day-to-day routine is quite different than what the outsider sees. It's a question of context, of routine, of perspective.

The best thing the coalition could do is put on tours of their operations--try to drown the PETA expose in a sea of transparency. But that assumes a routine tour wouldn't upset tender-minded undergraduates.

Fearless Prediction: This Question Won't be Asked

Either in the televised debates or by any reporter of any national political figure or candidate:

"What would you do with the programs the Bush administration ranks as ineffective? (See this link and my previous post.)"

Instead, there will be lots of talk about government waste and inefficiency. I'm not saying there isn't waste and inefficiency; I'm saying the Republicans have been in charge of the executive branch for most of the last 40 years. Any entity has waste, reflect on that on your next bathroom break. It's true in government, true on Wall street, true on Main Street, true in the home.

Ah, Youth

I suppose that's the response of any old geezer to whippersnappers full of juice and enthusiasm, as here:

And what is success? Success is an edible future, when local populations are fed by local fields and sensible nutrition is affordable and accessible. Where we address poverty and hunger, not with biotechnology, but with long-term access to the means of production, and with proximity to that productive plenty which we can achieve only with careful stewardship of our soil and land base -- a wealth immeasurable in dollars. Success is a smooth energy transition, a satisfying daily bread, a culture in which we have restored honor, and respect to the profession of farming.

Call to arms

Arms strong and hands calloused, eyes open to the beauty of every morning, spirits prepared for the long row still to hoe, hearts full with the support of family and community, let us unite, young farmers, and fight for the right to farmable land, the pursuit of an equitable marketplace, and for recognition from society that we are here, indispensable, a cornerstone of our food future. Let us welcome many new entrants into agriculture, striving to share our lessons, seeds and stories with generations to come. Now is the time for action.

I guess, having gently mocked them, they deserve their link.

Calvin L. Beale, a Bureaucrat? [Updated]

Calvin L. Beale was the senior demographer in USDA, and just died, picking up some nice obits.

One mention calls him a "faceless bureaucrat", while using his death to push the idea of a rural renaissance in Missouri (which he'd first identified in the 1960's). A somewhat belated story in the Post today adds more human interest, among which is this:

What may be even more remarkable is that Mr. Beale never charged his trips to a government expense account. He paid for everything -- airline tickets, car rentals and hotels -- out of his own pocket. He also scrupulously arrived at his office desk 30 minutes early each morning, so as not to waste the government's time while eating his breakfast of half a muffin.

Here's a link to his photos of courthouses. (It seems as if a plurality of courthouses were built in the two decades 1890-1910, which was the same time period Andrew Carnegie was financing his libraries.)

The Daily Yonder has an article on him

Two Different Posts

Not how to interpret these:

At farmgate, the UofIll site, comes a paper on the pricing of seed corn--an excerpt:

"The WI trio examined seed corn pricing in Illinois in 2004 to illustrate how stacked traits were actually priced:
• Conventional seed corn averaged $88.33 per bag.
• The Bt corn borer trait added $20.49
• The Bt rootworm trait was alone worth $27.28.
• One herbicide tolerant trait was priced at $14.51, another at $6.83.
• Double stacking of corn borer and rootworm traits added $35.51.
• Triple stacking of corn borer, rootworm, and herbicide tolerance added $37.30.
• Quadruple stacking added $39.45 for corn borer, rootworm and both herbicide tolerant traits.
• The market power of the seed company added over 8% to the price."

At Grist, Tom Philpott pushes an interview with an author:

"...the relationship between organisms and individual genes is much more complex and mysterious than researchers originally thought. And that, Kimbrell says in this interview, helps explain why after 25 years of R&D, the GMO industry has only managed to create a couple of viable traits. The main one, of course, is "herbicide tolerance," e.g., Monsanto's Round Up Ready corn and soy, engineered to withstand copious lashings of its flagship herbicide, Round Up."

Technical Corrections and Farm Constitution

Congressman Etheridge is introducing legislation to fix the 10-acre "problem" in the 2008 farm bill. The legislation directs the USDA to allow aggregation of base acres and will allow producers to combine multiple farms into one farm through the reconstitution process. Since many years ago I was responsible for this area, I'll be interested to see how this is implemented.

It's not always easy to carry legislation into implementation, as can be inferred from a post at Whiskey Burn entitled "Amazingly Trivial Things" about "technical corrections" to the farm bill. Dan (formerly of Blog for Rural America) disdains the nit-picking objections of the good folks in the Office of General Counsel to language in the farm bill, a disdain commonly found in non-lawyers. (Rather like the disdain non-librarians have for the Dewey decimal system.) Dan thinks the intent is clear, so FSA ought to implement on that basis.