And You Can Fool a Few of the People All the Time

Mostly architects, apparently. Here's another vertical farm/garden building and it won an award. Apparently in the parallel universe these people exist in the sun shines on everyone, whether they're on the north, south, east, or west side of the building. (I don't want to taint every foodie with this nonsense, so I've set up a new tab.)

Farmers and the Estate Tax

John Phipps has an interesting post. Bottom line, the adverse effect of estate taxes on farmers is the lawyers' fees you pay while living, not the tax your heirs pay Uncle.

Ants Freeload? Who Knew?

A very good science section in the NYTimes last week (I lost track of this in draft form), highlighted by a story which disrupts all one's preconceptions about ants. Turns out if you have the patience of Job, or Anna Dornhaus, and track individual ants over their lifetime, some ants freeload just as some humans do. And some "specialists" aren't very good at their jobs.

USDA Has a Ways to Go

The official federal government website, usa.gov, has tabs for "audiences". On that page, there's a link for "Rural Communities and Citizens". Click on that, and you get to the National Agricultural Library. Once there, there's a "Browse by Subject" heading, with a link for "USDA Rural Programs." Once there, there are four items under "Spotlights", two of which are the 2008 Bush administration proposals for the 2008 farm bill, and a side by side comparison of the 2008 and 2002 farm bills. Rather out of date IMHO.

In addition, the "In the News" section, which displays news items seems to have some problems--when I checked it displayed 3 items from Brownfield, including one which seemed likely to be on the Pigford issue, but when I clicked on it there was a long list of news items, but not the one I clicked on.

Grassley and Hagan on Pigford

The two Senators have introduced legislation re: Pigford claims. From Grassley's statement:

This bill will make 3 changes to the farm bill. First it will allow the claimants to access the $100 million already appropriated in the farm bill, but once that is expended gain access to the Department of Treasury permanent appropriated judgment fund. Second, it will allow reasonable attorney fees, administrative costs, and expenses to be paid from the judgment fund in accordance with the 1999 consent decree. Finally, it includes a section making fraud related to claims a criminal offense with punishment of a fine or up to 5 years in prison or both.

RSS Feeds--FSA Over NRCS

To track the competition (which is a figment of my imagination because all NRCS employees love all FSA employees and vice versa), score one for FSA. The FSA website displays the RSS feed subscription icon prominently. (I think it's new, although a user has been able to get news releases by email for several years.) I don't see the equivalent on the NRCS site.

Of course, the Assistant Secretary for Administration is a former head of NRCS, which means NRCS alumni have an edge at the upper echelons of the department.

Sometimes I Wonder

How much attention is being paid to e-government? From the FSA explanation of its on-line customer statement:

"The USDA Customer Statement is a special focus of the eGovernment initiatives that Agriculture."

That's the first sentence on the explanation, with no verb after "Agriculture". It might be a false start, because the next sentence and the rest of page reads okay. But you'd think in 3 years someone would have noticed and corrected the error.

Who Watches the Watchers? GAO Lacks Controls

One of GAO's favorite criticisms of hard-working bureaucrats is "they lack controls". Yes, GAO is the home of the original Puritans, where control is everything.

Thus I take particular pleasure from this small item in the Post: a former contract worker for GAO was able to steal 89 laptops from them over a period of 16 months! Sounds as if they need to improve their controls.

Distribution of Organic Production

The other day the NY Times had a nice set of maps showing the distribution of organic production across the country. It seemed concentrated in the blue states, NY, MI, WI, MN, and the west coast. But Michael Roberts adds his expertise to caution us about easy interpretations of pretty pictures.

Good News for Foodies

According to their trade association, sales of organic products grew by 17 percent in 2008. (Nonfood products were up 38 percent.)