How Congress Works

By smoke and mirrors and stuff buried in the weeds. The POGO blog has a post describing what happened over 20 years ago. To save money, Congress changed the formula for determining hourly wages for CS employees from dividing by 2080 hours in a year to dividing by 2087. (2080 would be 52 weeks in a year, or 364 days in a year. 2087 allows for the 365th and 366th days.) So the change was more accurate, but it had the effect of lowering hourly rates, which would slightly lower budget expenses. The thing is, they've allowed government contractors to use the 2080 figure all along, which POGO objects to.

Nickels and dimes over years add up to real money (although not by Sen. Dirksen's definition).

On Being Too Brief

I assume the writer, or at least the sources, know better than this:

For instance, nitrogen—which comes from fertilizers—in the form of nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

I'm no chemist but nitrogen, if I remember, is about 80 percent of the atmosphere. And "nitrogen" fertilizer is not nitrogen, but nitrates (that's why it takes energy to make chemical fertilizer). Wikipedia may be reliable,, or not:

Nitrous oxide is emitted by bacteria in soils and oceans, and thus has been a part of Earth's atmosphere for eons. Agriculture is the main source of human-produced nitrous oxide: cultivating soil, the use of nitrogen fertilizers, and animal waste handling can all stimulate naturally occurring bacteria to produce more nitrous oxide. The livestock sector (primarily cows, chickens, and pigs) produces 65% of human-related nitrous oxide. ^[1] Industrial sources make up only about 20% of all anthropogenic sources, and include the production of nylon and nitric acid, and the burning of fossil fuel in internal combustion engines. Human activity is thought to account for somewhat less than 2 teragrams of nitrogen oxides per year, nature for over 15 teragrams.^[2]

If I understand, chemical "nitrogen" fertilizers are mostly anhydrous ammonia, ammonia nitrate, and urea.

May Farmers and FSA Live in Interesting Times

John Phipps notes the problems of the ACRE program--handling a multi-year program contract when cash leases can change year to year. And Uof Illinois's farmgate has a discussion of the problems in getting lease terms which are fair to both owner and leasor. Things don't get any easier for FSA, or farmers.

One Man's War

Musings from a Stonehead has a long post describing the WWI career of a relative. Who knew Australia had hairdressers in 1916? And what about Field Punishment No. 2 (doing your military stuff while shackled). I like it because it has the grit of reality, something so often missing from ceremonies honoring veterans.

Worrying About the User

Not the drug user, the user of your IT system. The usability.gov site has some basics. (Hat tip: Government Gab.) It's the best government site I've seen.

I've always been fascinated by the process of developing IT systems. Part of it is the problem of designing a system, just fitting the pieces together into a whole which hopefully accomplishes the goal, part is the interplay between reality (how users work and think) and the design, part is handling the many tradeoffs involved--what the ideal would seem to be versus what can be done in the time available with the talent and equipment available.

In the late 1980's "usability labs" started to become popular and we made a bit of use of them. The problem then was we were using an information engineering approach (descended from IBM methodology, if I recall) which didn't work well with usability tests.

Work

Call it "industrial agriculture", call it whatever. But definitely work (at harvest time) whether corn or peanuts.

USDA's MIDAS

GAO doesn't have a high opinion of the USDA/FSA plans for MIDAS. (Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems) Neither do I--a quote:

As part of USDA’s plan to reduce the time frame for implementing MIDAS by 80 percent,officials plan to condense the requirements analysis phase from four years to five months. Moreover, they plan to reduce the analysis and design portion of the acquisition from three and a half years to nine months.

Several times over the years I was involved in requirements analysis, first for FSA and then for all the USDA agencies with offices at the county level. Sounds as if there have been 10 years of poor management since I left. (And years of poor management before then.)

Hunting and Locavores

An interesting article in Slate, taking off from Gov. Palin's hunting, on the history of hunting in the U.S. (hint--it's tied to aristocracy and is now in a big decline) and ending with its relationship to locavore food.

Personally, I never hunted for food--just killed woodchucks (rather unsuccessfully), possums, and skunks (raiding henhouse).

A Lesson from Organic Pecans

Here's a piece that is surprising.

First, it's reporting on research into organic farming of pecans, by the Agricultural Research Service. We usually assume, and organic proponents often allege, USDA is anti-organic, but not on this evidence.

Second, it provides evidence organic methods of improving the soil and fighting pests, while more expensive, easily pay their way by increasing yields and quality, without relying on any price premium for "organic".

Third, it's claimed probably to be applicable to other tree crops.

Fourth, while the image one has (at least I do) for organic methods is rather romantic, the methods used here sound very rational. That means, for me, it's likely that we're talking a new concept, which might be called "industrial organic" farming. That is, large scale application of industrially produced additives such as iron, zinc, boron, copper, and manganese and spinosad.

Welcome to the Glass House: Program Payments and Donations

The Tulsa World has a two-part series on farm program payments and their recipients. By matching the payments against the public records of those who make political donations they identified many Oklahomans who are professionals and receive the payments.

In the second part they identified farmers who received payments but who were also fined for violations (apparently mostly CAFO's who violated environmental rules). An FSA official was quoted, correctly, as saying there was no cross-compliance provision--eligibility for FSA program payments is independent of violations/eligibility for other programs.

This is just a start. President-elect Obama included a pledge of transparency in his platform and today, with databases and the Internet, you can see it working in some areas. I'd start a pool on how long it takes EWG and/or other publications to emulate the Tulsa paper, and then on how long it is before members of Congress start pushing to bar payments to environmental violations.

And for people who aren't involved in agriculture or farm programs, your turn is next. Farm program payments are a test case for transparency simply because EWG was able to obtain the data and put it online back in the 1990's, well ahead of similar efforts in other areas.