Crop Insurance Programs for Revenue

FCIC was initiating the revenue crop insurance programs just before I left USDA. Farmgate has an interesting piece on the current prospects for indemnity checks under them. What's most bothersome is this:

One of the uncontrollable issues is what the USDA’s Risk Management Agency does with the yield expectations. If your county yield is set too low, GRIP will never pay off. If it is set too high, GRIP is guaranteed income. Additionally, RMA's crop insurance ratings for some counties are not actuarially sound, and in some counties farmers will almost always get a payment and in others they almost always will never get a payment.

Too much chance for screwups here--hopefully this pessimistic picture is overdrawn.

Some People Are Born Romantics

Most romantics find their satisfaction in praising nature, but some people (like thecottonwife) have an expansive spirit which finds beauty in other things:

"And if the drying shed is close enough to the house (and it is to ours) it provides you with the best sleep you’ve ever gotten. That peanut smell… the sound of the fan… a clear star-filled sky… the windows open… there is no better sleep on earth. I can practically hear my mom and my grandma sighing at the memory of that right now."

Personally, I remember sleeping on the sleeping porch after a late summer thunderstorm, with the rain drops still falling from the leaves of the big maple tree.

Costly Fruits and Vegetables?

One of the recurring themes of critics of the current food system is that calories are cheap, while fruits and vegetables are costly. I stumbled over this factoid from ERS while researching something else:

"How Much Do Americans Pay for Fruits and Vegetables?—One argument for not consuming fruits and vegetables is that they are too expensive, especially when fresh. Yet among 154 forms of fruits and vegetables priced using ACNeilsen Homescan data, more than half were estimated to cost 25 cents or less per serving. Consumers can meet the recommendation of three servings of fruits and four servings of vegetables daily for 64 cents. The related data product is a collection of spreadsheets that contain all the data used in the report and are presented to show exactly how ERS arrived at the costs per serving figures."

I didn't dig into it, but it's a reminder things are more complex than we imagine.

POGO Recommendations

No, this isn't "Pogo", the Walt Kelly creation, but something not amusing at all--the Project on Government Oversight. They've issued recommendations for the new President here. They don't turn me on, but different strokes for different folks. (One comment--if the Pres could involve staffers from the hill in the review of program effectiveness, it might help.)

Shocked, Shocked I Say

That the administration is sending its appointees out to campaign under the guise of "official events". See here.

Believe me, it's what administrations do. (Though normally not State, DOD, Treasury, or Justice, the old-line posts, and that seems to be the rule this time as well.)

Government Policing Farmers

The 1985 farm bill instituted compliance with "sodbuster/swampbuster" provisions as a prerequisite for earning certain farm bill payments. This was a major wrench for the USDA agencies, particularly the Soil Conservation Service (as NRCS was then called). SCS was used to being the farmer's friend and educator, helping install farm ponds and contour cropping trips. Sod/swamp moved them more into the policeman role, determining what the farmer had to do to comply. An interesting history could be written of the next 23 years, as farm groups lobbied for changes, conservation groups fought back, SCS and FSA felt caught in the middle.

Now we can anticipate other changes. As my right-wing friends might say, an ever-encroaching government bureaucracy taking away farmers' freedoms. Here's an piece in Mulch, on the problems of controlling run-off pollution in watersheds (a problem already faced in the New York City watershed). The writer struggles to plot a course between purely "voluntary" conservation measures, which aren't that effective, and alternatives, trying to identify alternatives which aren't oppressive. For an old cynic, the struggle is most interesting.

Funniest Sentence of the Day

From Simon Winchester, who's written a book on the Oxford English Dictionary (among many others), writing in the NYTimes about the change in meaning of "subprime":

The current print edition of the O.E.D., for example, still sports this definition of the unusual word “abbreviator”: “a junior official of the Vatican, whose duties include drawing up the pope’s briefs” — which would clearly, after briefs-as-legal-documents transmuted into briefs-as-boxer-alternatives, benefit from some rewriting.

How Legislation Is Implemented III

In a word, slowly. This appeared in the Federal Register:

Implementing the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 Including How to Become a Patient Safety Organization: Interim Guidance Availability

from Regulations.gov

Implementing the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (of 2005): How to Become a Patient Safety Organization; Interim Guidance Availability

Don't Trust Mid-level Bureaucrats

The power of the bureaucrat who is politically-savvy and can forge connections to Congress is shown in Eric Lipton's story this weekend.

It's a version of the "iron triangle" (which I first heard used about a North Korean/Chinese area in the Korean War) where private interests, bureaucrats in the executive, and Congress types scratch each other's backs. What's unusual in the story is that the DOD bureaucrat was lower in the bureaucracy and more enterprising than one normally encounters. But the bureaucrat got dollars appropriated for programs that mostly weren't useful, except in keeping his bit of the bureaucracy going; the private companies got money, and the Congress types (Senators) brought home the bacon for the home folks. It's the sort of thing that McCain means in his attacks on earmarks.

Pure Sentiment--Cornell Photo

See here.

It's a nice photo.