Obesity and Fast Food

The Times has an article on a study which found proximity to fast food outlets was strongly correlated with obesity. It sounds impressive.

New Farmers in Nebraska

U of Nebraska has a piece on ag students possibly returning to the farm and the hurdles they face. It's interesting, but would be discouraging for the alternative ag people--the only farming option discussed is the "factory farm", or "industrial ag"--no consideration of mini-farms growing fruits and veggies.

House Ag and Implementing Conservation Programs

House Ag had a hearing with NRCS and FSA, plus the OIG and GAO types, on problems with handling conservation program payments, including this GAO report. I briefly yield to my FSA partisanship and note the following excerpts from the IG's prepared testimony.

These problems occurred because NRCS lacked federal financial accounting expertise. Until 2004, NRCS had relied on FSA employees to help account for its transactions, and had not cultivated a staff of accounting professionals. Part of this problem also has to do with how NRCS understands its mission within USDA. Many NRCS officials perceive their primary role as providing technical and scientific assistance to producers. Training employees to correctly account for its activities was not the agency’s first priority.

We found possible noncompliance issues on approximately 40 percent of the[WRP] easement sites we inspected.

I'm wondering about the background of shifting payments from FSA to NRCS--presumably the NRCS interest groups had bigger clout on Capitol Hill than the FSA interest groups.

This area is of more than passing interest to me, given my guess that NRCS will be given responsibility for Vilsack's carbon offsets (remember, you heard it here first).

Best Sentence Today, Mar 25

"I have a firm rule - I eat the mean people." (From Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm, on his culling policy.)

Little Known Fact About Farming and Taxes

Trying to track down a cryptic bit on payment limitation and ACRE, I ran across this from a footnote in the Congressional Research Service report on the 2008 farm bill:

Farms overwhelmingly report losses for tax purposes (because of cash accounting, depreciation, and other practices), even though USDA farm income numbers are positive. For example, in 2004, two-thirds of all Schedule F tax returns showed a loss, resulting in a sector-wide net farm loss of $13 billion for all Schedule F returns. By comparison, USDA farm income data showed an $80 billion profit. Even for “large” farms with sales over $250,000, about one-third report a loss for tax
purposes.

And Was Senator Lincoln in Attendance?

Or maybe Sen. Chambliss (in my mind, no doubt unfairly, I see Lincoln and Chambliss as the leading protectors of the current payment limitation rules)? So it may taken Lincoln only a nano-second to call Vilsack and point out Obama needs her vote on the 2010 budget so what the &***% does he mean by this response to a Sustainable Ag meeting:

"Vilsack said that he is aware of the need for a strong new rule on what it means to be “actively engaged in agriculture” for the purpose of commodity payments."

Suckers Born Every Minute [Revised]

NPR has a story on custom-gardening--outfits who come in and set up your garden for you. They claim a 150-square foot garden will keep a small family in vegetables for a year. I suppose it all depends on your definition of "keep". If you eat at home every other day, maybe. If you're eating lots of vegetables every day, I doubt it. Our garden is nominally 500 sq feet, though probably closer to 400, once you allow for the compost bin and path. It keeps us in salads from late April to November or December, but we still buy vegetables (like potatoes and jicama) during that period, and tomatoes up to July.

It's easy to over-sell this stuff.

Soil Testing

Extension.org has many posts each day which I skim as fast as I can spin the mouse wheel. But there's one on farming fundamentals which caught my eye--"soil testing". The writer noted that Extension Service has pushed it for 100 years.

A question, though: If modern technology can meter the fertilizer applied to the soil according to the GPS coordinates of the soil, can't the technology do soil testing better than the way it was done 100 years ago?

Two Different Earths

There's this earth, as described at Powerline:

Due to the efforts of Heartland and others, the public is beginning to catch on to the cosmic scam that Al Gore, James Hansen and others--mostly not scientists--have been perpetrating. Meanwhile, the Obama administration, seemingly determined to inflict the maximum possible damage on the economy in the shortest time, is trying to ram a cap-and-trade carbon tax through Congress before opposition can be mobilized.

And there's this earth (or at least this America) as described by Joseph Romm at Gristmill (one in which a survey says):

Americans say they are prepared to incur significant costs [to fight global warming], as the figure above shows. In fact, they "support policies that would personally cost them more," specifically (emphasis in original):

I'm not sure, I fear a schizophrenic society.

Undoing Reforms--Administrative Conference of the US

This post at OMBwatch records the revival of the Administrative Conference of the US, a body which was killed in 1995, by, if I remember, Newt Gingrich. It's a deep in the weeds thing:

"ACUS was created in 1968 as an independent agency with a small staff assisted by outside experts in administrative law, government processes, judicial review and enforcement, and agency regulatory processes."

Did things like worry about the Federal Register and the Administrative Procedure Act. (Only bureaucrats care about such things.)