Food Safety

NYTimes reports the food system seems to be more safe than it was 10 years ago. It's complicated because we're better at identifying problems than we were. "Industrial ag" can institute more controls, do more testing, police interfaces better, but a problem gets spread much wider. More organic and locavore agriculture depends less on technology and safeguards and more on the integrity and good practices of the farmer.

The Worst Question Today

Comes in the Washington Post from Howard Kurtz, writing on the fate of newspapers:

"Why did no establishment media company create a Craigslist, a Huffington Post, a Google News, a Twitter, or other sites that have altered the boundaries of news and information?"

The answer is twofold:

1. With the possible exception of Huffington Post, which I've never visited, the creators of the other sites were doing something different, but not trying to create "Craigslist", etc. Craigslist as it exists today is the result of a long evolution, it wasn't created in one go.
2. Established media companies, just as for any bureaucracy, spend their energies doing their established job. The publisher of the NYTimes doesn't come to work every day asking himself/herself: what are we going to do differently today? The workday is shaped by the expectations of his/her employees, advertisers, etc. The creator of Craigslist came to work everyday with no web of expectations--no one had ever seen a craigslist, so he was free to create it. (See the Christensen books for expansion of the point.)
   

The Iron Lung

The Post carried an AP story about an NC woman who lived 61 years in an iron lung. For those who may be too young, the iron lung added significantly to the fear we had of polio when I was growing up. Epidemics/outbreaks of infectious disease were common enough in my childhood, although down significantly from the previous century. That history makes me very impatient with those who don't vaccinate their children. (And makes me follow Respectful Insolence, a blogger who mocks such people.)

NIMBY Among the LIberals

Treehugger reports that highspeed rail loses support when the tracks are in your backyard, depressing your housing values. (To show liberals aren't always and everywhere hypocrites, my Representative wrote an op-ed welcoming, albeit lukewarmly, terrorists to his district for trial (the Federal courthouse in Alexandria, VA. )

Our Weak Government

Jason DeParle has a good article in the Times today, discussing the many variances in the safety net among the states:

Just 50 percent of people eligible for food stamps receive them in California, compared with 98 percent in Missouri. Nineteen percent of the unemployed get jobless benefits in South Dakota, compared with 67 percent in Idaho.

Fifteen states rank among the top 10 in providing one form of aid and the bottom 10 in another. California ranks second in distributing cash welfare but last in food stamps. South Dakota, last in jobless benefits, is first in subsidized housing.

That's another example of why our government, which the right thinks is too powerful and too oppressive, is in my mind too weak.

(In one of the stories he traces amid the statistics, a foodstamp applicant finds misunderstanding among the agencies, and finally an erroneous USDA web page.)

FSA Gets Better on Recovery

I've criticized FSA for being tardy in updating their site to cover ARRA (recovery act) activities. They seem to have updated in the last week--here's the IT page. It doesn't say much, except $19 million for MIDAS. In my surfing of websites I mentioned earlier today I stumbled across a joint project of RMA and FSA for crop acreage reporting. I'd like to know more about that.

Bureaucratic Silos

I think it's telling that 15 years after Congress merged part of Farmer's Home Administration with Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service to form FSA, we still have separate employee organizations--NASCOE and the National Association of Credit Specialists and the National Association of Support Employees of the Farm Service Agency.

It's perhaps more telling that a person who prides himself on looking across agencies (that would be moi) hadn't visited the latter two sites until today.

Capping Marketing Assistance--Corrected

From Obama's budget:

This proposal would limit farm commodity payments to $250,000 per person to direct payments to those farmers who most need them. This would be accomplished by maintaining the 2008 Farm Bill payment limits for Direct and Counter-Cyclical Payments ($40,000 and $65,000 respectively), but capping marketing assistance loan gains (price support payments) at $145,000 per person. The 2008 Farm Bill eliminated all caps on marketing loan gains, which were previously capped at $75,000 per person ($150,000 if you had multiple farms). According to the Department of Agriculture's 2007 Agricultural Resource ManagementSurvey, roughly 16 percent of farms had sales of greater than $250,000, yet they collected about 57 percent of all commodity payments.1

I may be missing something elsewhere in the fine print, but I think this is different than Obama's proposal earlier (limiting payments to farmers who have gross income over $500K). [Updated--removed last sentence--I don't think the newspapers were the ones who said Obama was holding to his original proposal--sometimes it's hard to remember what you read where.]

[5-8-09 Correction--I've found the basis for reports that Obama's budget persists in the elimination of payments to farmers getting over $500K--page 86 of the terminations and reductions. So I was wrong, stopping too fast in my research. Apologies for misleading anyone.]

Farmgate Not Uptodate

From Farmgate:

If you sign up for ACRE, FSA offices will require historical farm yield information. At this time, USDA has not released the rules on what documents are required, and what happens if you don’t have them, says IL Extension economist Nick Paulson. Those rules may come soon, since the announced sign-up period for ACRE begins on June 1.

I think this notice covers pulse crop evidence and handbook 1-DCP covers ACRE generally. (I'm interested in the idea that at least some extension people don't follow the FSA website--it takes a long while to convert everyone's habits.) It also looks as if some county offices have put out a newsletter containing a summary of the rules--do a search for "ACRE production evidence" on the website and you get a list of county letters with titles indicating relevance.

Cows Trade Privacy for Contentment

Oregon State brings news--a new device to track how much downtime a cow has. (The more downtime, the more milk. Maybe some bureaucrats are really cows?)

Wanting to help dairy farmers learn more about this to maximize their milk production, Oregon State University has launched research to study the factors that influence dairy cows' comfort level. To do this, the OSU dairy center is using an Israeli-made ankle bracelet that senses when a cow is lying down by determining the angle of her leg to the ground. When a cow lies down, the blood flow to her udder increases, which produces more milk.