How Many USDA Employees?

Here
Hat tip, Farmpolicy.com

Standards

The "21" club has dropped its absolute tie requirement. For you whippersnappers, good restaurants used to require a coat and tie. But no more, according to today's NY Times. And "21" used to be the epitome of style and fashion, which country bumpkin farm boys had vaguely heard of, but movie stars like Bogie frequented. [updated]

And do I need to mention this piece of "how-to" advice--disgusting it should be on the web. :-)

For everyone who mourns the loss of standards, I recommend Gran Torino, which my wife and I saw yesterday. (Of course, Eastwood is the star of my favorite movie, Kelly's Heroes, which no one has ever heard of but it captures the nihilism of the late 60's perfectly.) Eastwood's character's granddaughter has multiple piercings, need I say more?

It seems the old Catch-22 is at work. In a poor economy, restaurants have to lower standards to compete. In a boom economy, consumers have to try the worst things to try to stand out. What's an old timer to do?

One E-Mail System for USDA

From Vilsack's press conference:

It [updating USDA systems] will not be easy. It's not easy because the way in which technology has been developed in the Department over time has been that each subcabinet area, each agency of the 29 agencies that make up the USDA, all of them have made, to a certain extent, independent decisions about the technology. And so one of the keys is to try to make sure that we work to develop a consistent system so that, for example, the Secretary of Agriculture can send one e-mail to employees on any issue as opposed to what happens today where multiple e-mails have to be sent because different agencies use different computer systems.

Not sure he really wants to send an email with 100,000 addressees.

The Human Cost of the Presidency

Mr. Morris has a blog post at the NYTimes interviewing people who took many of the photos of Bush over the years--more or less the expected fare until you get to the last 3 photos, snapped after his last address to the nation. They show the toll, and touch even the heart of someone who didn't think much of him.

The Rice Crisis, Revisited

The NY Times has an article today on the effects of rice prices in Senegal. Last year's high rice prices caused rice farmers there to increase their acreage:

It is a great thing that local growers are finally expanding production, he said, but their investments are incredibly fragile.

“We don’t have any control of the market,” he said. “There is huge volatility, and that makes it very difficult to protect their investments.”

If farmers lose a lot of money this year, they are unlikely to risk planting again, Mr. Ly said, which could prove catastrophic.

In a report released in November, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned that low prices this season could create an even worse replay of last year’s crisis by discouraging planters from producing.

“If prices were to remain depressed in 2008-9 and plantings for next year are affected,” the report said, “a similar, if not more pronounced, price surge may be witnessed in 2009-10, unleashing even more severe food crises than those experienced in the current season.”

In a nutshell, this is the economics of farming field crops. Farmers are "price takers", with no ability to adjust production to meet demand (unless organized into a cartel, like OPEC or the tree crop growers). Good prices one year brings expanded production the next, leading to boom and bust cycles, which are very hard on the individual farmer, particularly the small, young, and/or struggling one.

Problems With Wikipedia

I think there's a systemic problem with Wikipedia's coverage of certain topics: specifically the "hot", gloom and doom topics which bubble to the top of the media. The problem is the people who care most about the topic, and who therefore are most likely to do or edit a wikipedia article, are those whose emotions are stirred by the impending disaster. (In other words, all the young whippersnappers out there who haven't had the experience of ups and downs I've had.) When the disaster is looming, people edit wikipedia. When the disaster fades, the people whose emotions were engaged have moved on to other topics. Or they're reluctant to admit forever they were wrong. My proof:

the latest price for Rice is for April, 2008.
the "2008 global rice shortage"
the 2007-2008 world food crisis.

None of these reflect such data as this from USDA:

Global 2008/09 rice production, consumption, and ending stocks are raised slightly from a month ago, while trade is little changed. The increase in global rice production is due primarily to a larger 2008/09 rice crop in China, which is up 4.2 million tons to 135.1 million, and the largest crop since 1999/00. The increase in China’s crop is due to an increase in both area harvested and yield and is based in part on national and provincial government information. Global ending stocks are projected at 82.7 million tons, up 1.8 million from last month, up 4.0 million from 2007/08, and the largest stocks since 2002/03.

Or this from FAO:

Prices for most agricultural commodities have dropped significantly and swiftly in recent months. World grain prices have fallen by over 50 percent from their record highs earlier this year. International prices for other important foodstuffs, such as vegetable oils, oilseeds or dairy products have also drifted downwards, even if they still remain above their longer term trend levels. Rice is still expensive but prices may follow the path for other foodstuffs as the new crop comes on stream, export restrictions are relaxed and demand shifts further to cheaper alternatives.

or this:

CEREALS

Cereal supplies rise, international prices fall

FAO’s forecast for world cereal production in 2008 now stands at 242 million tonnes (including rice in milled terms), 5.3 percent more than in 2007 and a new record. Among the major cereals, the most significant production expansion is forecast for wheat, up 11 percent from last year, but production of coarse grains is also forecast to surpass last year’s record by at least 3 percent, while rice production is anticipated to exceed the already excellent results achieved in 2007 by more than 2 percent. A combination of exceptionally high prices, which encouraged plantings, and generally favourable weather conditions contributed to the boost in world cereal production this year.

Vilsack Wants Comments?

According to this press release, Vilsack is extending the period for comments on the payment limitation regs, although signalling no change in their provisions for the 2009 crop year. He also talks of his priorities--FSA IT and Pigford among them.

BTW, note the URL has been compressed by tinyurl. (One of my correspondents has mentioned the long length of the USDA's URLs. I haven't regularly used tinyurl.com, but it's useful.)

France and US on Religion

Mr. Beauregard blogs on Sarkozy, the impending strike, and Obama--here's an excerpt:

Put in republican terms; Obama's inauguration speech was filled with religious leitmotifs. Unthinakble in France; Our conception of the republic is resolutely secular. The Republic is a bulwark against religion and the ravages of religion. In the States the Republic protects the Church from the ravages of the state. In the morning, French kids don't salute the flag or sing the national anthem. The French are not a patriotic lot. certainly chauvinistic but not as patriotic as the Americans - and all that shapes internal politics. An American will run the flag up at home, and tell you with a big smile and hand on heart that he or she believes in God. In France, you can be interned for such behaviour. The psycholgy shapes people and shapes politics.

Stimulus and Government

John Phipps has a long post, arguing for stimulus investment in infrastructure as opposed to tax cuts. It's worth reading. Two points he misses, though:

• government spending on infrastructure is highly visible. We can see how FSA spends its millions, and thus judge whether or not it spends them wisely or not, or even spends them timely. We can't similarly see the ways in which tax cuts are used.
  
• there's the assumption that government will be more stupid in its spending than the private sector. Again, because of the difference in visibility, the assumption can't be proved. Suppose a tax cut goes mostly to personal consumption spending, meals out, bigger cars, bigger houses, more vacations, more luxuries. My Calvinistic forebears shout from their graves that's wasteful, not productive.
  

FSA, IT, and Stimulus

Here's an article on Nextgov about FSA and the $245 million. Two of the final paragraphs:

Patrick Hanley, project manager for the program to modernize the farm benefits system, said the agency is working closely with the Office of Management and Budget to make sure the new systems would comply with the federal enterprise architecture, to ensure FSA's systems can share information with other federal agencies. Hanley said the $245 million in the House stimulus bill would allow FSA to stabilize the current infrastructure and initiate modernization efforts. The money would satisfy estimates for the first two years of implementation, Taitano said.

Agency officials also are looking into commercial off-the-shelf software solutions that could help with payment processing, according to Hanley. But the initial focus will be on infrastructure and making sure the back-end servers and network are capable of handling the volume of transactions at FSA, he said.

Many years ago (i.e., 1989) we were working on the cost-benefit justification for the replacement of the System/36's with the idea there would be a big bang, big buy. Like Sisyphus, we kept rolling the rock up the hill, and having it come back and squash us. Best I can tell, in the 20 years since there was a piecemeal replacement of System/36's with AS/400's, a gradual migration of some common functions and certain programs to the Internet, and a bit of integration between NRCS and FSA. (I'm probably biased in my assessment.)

To the extent USDA needs to buy more servers and network hardware, that should be doable within this FY. That is, it may be "shovel ready". I don't know about software development--GAO has questioned USDA's management of the MIDAS project. See my posts here and here

FSA has moved its payment function out of the county offices to centralized processing in Kansas City. That's been operational for a month or so, and hasn't blown up, yet. So I'm not clear on what COTS (commercial off-the-shelf software) could help.