Bread and (Breast) Milk

From a New Yorker article on breast milk (author Jill LePore will take questions at the New Yorker site):

"(A brief history of food: when the rich eat white bread and buy formula, the poor eat brown bread and breast-feed; then they trade places.)"

How Government Changes

Ezra Klein discusses the background to Cass Sunstein's new post. What's interesting is over the course of 25-30 years it's become accepted on all sides that the President's OMB should have control over regulations. It's a common practice: one party does an innovation which the other attacks. But when the roles switch, the innovation starts to become more acceptable. Soon it becomes an established practice.

A Little Love for Comerford

Tom Philpott at Grist gives a little love to the existing White House eating arrangements, and chef. Nice to see.

Outstanding Conservationist--Could Her Child Follow?

Article on the outstanding conservationist in Minnesota. She's been farming 53 years and milks 32 cows. I wonder, though, whether she's a good role model for the future. Could the next generation make their living * on 250 acres of dairy beef/calf operation?

*"living" defined as a modern life, frugal but with many mod cons, and the possibility of college for the kids.

What the article doesn't say is how many years she's been getting up at 4 a.m. to milk those cows and who's handling the milking while she's gadding about in the big city of St. Paul, MN.

Here a Scam, There a Scam, Everywhere a Scam

Though this doesn't rank with Mr. Madoff's scam, Treehugger reports at least one manufacturer of small wind turbines grossly exaggerated its potential output.

Just a reminder that people are con artists in every walk of life, from Wall Street to Green Street.

Bush's Place in History

Jacob Weisberg at Slate comes not to praise George W but to bury him, saying invading Iraq, the global war on terror, and the current financial mess are his three worst decisions but that we don't know that much about the inner workings of the administration. This isn't an outlier--there seems to be general agreement Bush is a bad President, and always will be such.

Not that, as a firm Democrat, I particularly like GWB, but I've lived too long to agree. Harry Truman left office with terrible ratings, but he's now very highly regarded, so things can change. A more recent example: Mr. Greenspan retired not so long ago with high praise from everyone, except for a few who thought he might have followed his irrational exuberance speech in the 1990's with some cold water on the high tech bubble. Now he's being blamed for the current mess.

The reputations of many of our presidents have fluctuated over the years. I'd suggest Bush's reputation will improve if:

• there is a significant terror attack on US soil (I don't think it will occur)
• Afghanistan stabilizes (in my view Bush's failure to get an exit strategy there is his worst failing)
• Iraq muddles through (the Korean "police action" was a big deal in Truman's rep as left, but now it looks okay). If 30 years from now Iraq is where South Korea is now, Bush will benefit, regardless of how flawed his administration was in (not) planning for the post-war.
• things like No Child Left Behind, the AIDS initiative in Africa, Medicare drug benefits, or other initiatives became seen as significant milestones. (Truman's integration of the armed forces seems larger today than it did then; Ike's interstate highways loom larger today than they seemed in 1960.)

Conversely, I can't imagine much which would hurt his reputation more than it is now.

Bottomline--he doesn't have anywhere to go but up.

A Kid with a Passion: Gorilla

The National Zoo welcomed a baby gorilla this weekend. The Post story included this sentence:

District resident Max Block, 10 -- who is so enamored of gorillas that he raised $2,500 at a lemonade stand this summer for a preservation group -- had been watching the drama unfold for much of the weekend. He arrived to see the baby Saturday, just a few hours after it was born

That's a lot of lemonade.

Tight Budgets

Chris Clayton at DTN has an interview with the President of the Farm Bureau predicting farm programs will face tight budgets. That, in my opinion, is bad news for the supporters of organic farming, sustainable agriculture, etc., simply because conventional ag has a stronger presence on the appropriations committees than they do.

Crystal Ball on USDA Organization

A commenter on this post asks whether I think the possible reorganization of USDA will eliminate FSA? Dragging out my crystal ball, I see into the future and provide this answer: "Darned if I know".

There seems to be an ebb and flow to these things. Back in the Ford administration there was a push to co-locate county offices which looked forward to some consolidation of administrative functions. Then Carter came in and priorities changed. Around 1984 they tried to consolidate state offices in the northeast, but Congress killed that one. Sec. Madigan started "Infoshare" and the consolidation of county offices in 1991. That effort evolved into the 1994 reorganization splitting FmHA and hiding Rural Electrification within RD, and then the aborted Glickman proposal for merged administrative support. The new millennium seems to have been relatively quiet, except for some more office closings.

I wonder how much NRCS and FSA customers use the Internet instead of county offices. I say this because I'm struck every day by how small the NY Times is when it lands on my doorstep. Newspapers seem to be losing more and more ground to the Internet. Retailers are also hurting now (it's been years since my wife or I were in a department store, though that is partially a reflection of how cheap we are, as well as our use of online shopping). Thinking abstractly, one would say there's fewer and fewer commercial farmers and more and more capability to do things online, so FSA is and should be on the way out.

On the other hand, government reacts slowly to changes and rural areas have lots more clout than the burbs and cities. And Congress seems determined to keep making the programs more and more complicated. ACRE, SURE, and direct attribution are good insurance against major changes in the number or organization of offices.

Old Aerial Photography

Here's an interesting article on efforts to retrieve the old aerial photography used in administering farm programs. The article refers to photos authorized in 1933, which surprises me but is possible. The project in Iowa is to try to identify possible "brownfields" for EPA, but they are historically important as well.