A Criticism of National Black Farmer Association

Here's a press release criticizing John Boyd and his association

Best Sentence of May 2

Today the wife is away playing so I'm getting some spring cleaning done. But this is definitely the best sentence I've read today:

"Many of us get unique subsidies for keeping our body temperature close to 98 degrees"

From John Phipps re: cap and trade/environmentalism and farming.

Engber at Slate on High Fructose Sugar

See here for what seems to be a good summary of the corn-derived, high fructose sugar issue.

Limits of Gov. 2.0

GovLoop.com is billed as a Social network for Government. (Still don't understand it, but I've added its RSS feed.) There's an interesting post here pointing out the limits of the sort of suggestion system the Obama administration has used, first before inauguration, and now in connection with recovery.gov. The main point is, by exposing ideas for user evaluation as they are posted, you get a big first mover advantage. Once you have 3 digits worth of suggestions, only the oddball like me will scroll through and evaluate. The writer prefers this:

Imagine if the National Dialogue first enabled submission of ideas with examples on an equal basis. Then it enabled a simultaneous consideration with an ability of public comment. Then the ideas were vetted based on the public comment received. And finally, the final ideas were then submitted with an alternative analysis based on meritocracy. The final ideas could credibly be considered by the broader audience, based on merit.

Division in the Ranks

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives has an April 23 press release attacking the Black Farmer demo of April 28. Devotes some words to the idea that it's the lawyers who are gaining from the effort on Pigford.

National Black Farmers

Had their demonstration on April 28. It didn't get much coverage, and the accuracy of the coverage it got was a bit lacking. The conference scheduled for yesterday seems to have evaporated, or at least disappeared from the website.

White House Harvest

Obamafoororama says the White House had their first harvest yesterday--lettuce. The accompanying picture looks more as if the kids are planting than harvesting. (The girls predominate--is that a reflection of the feminine nurturing principle.) They might have gotten some lettuce, because the pictures back when showed they were using transplants, not seeds. So a couple weeks growth made them harvestable, and purely by accident it's 100 days into the administration.

My wife's lettuce is up and coming, but it will be a while yet before we have salad--probably May 15 or so.

H1N1 Flu and Locavores

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain sees things differently than I did here--he believes locavore pig farmers won't be hurt, indeed will be helped, by the flu headlines. Perhaps he and his wife have more faith in the ability of people to resist scares. Or perhaps he's right, his niche is better bounded and more secure than I think. Time will tell (and hopefully I'll remember to check back on the issue. If not, blame senility.)

Expanding Animal Rights: Privacy?

NYTimes has an article on drugs and Kentucky Derby horses--one trainer cited the horse's privacy in refusing to talk to the reporter.

Stimulus Helping Curious George?

USDA has a new site for the stimulus act, a map showing the locations of work being funded by the act. Hat tip: FarmPolicy.com.

It's progress as far as transparency goes, but the underlying data is sparse. For example, Forest Service has $18K for Curious George. Actually, that's a cheap shot--the creators of "Curious George" founded a center for good crunchy type activities, about which you can read more at their site. I'm sure they'll make good use of the money. But when FS gives the dollar figure and the recipient, without providing any explanation, it's short-sighted and not very helpful. As I've suggested to USDA in their comments, they should either provide a paragraph of explanation or require the recipient to put up a page of explanation of what they're doing with the money, and include the URL of the page in the USDA site.