Unpleasant Report for Bureaucracies

It seems bureaucrats are better at paying their bills timely than the bureaucracies they run--from a Government Executive article on a Congressional Research Service report:

According to the most recent data from the Office of Management and Budget, in January 2009, governmentwide delinquency rate for centrally billed card accounts -- those paid by an agency rather than an employee -- was 19.23 percent. The average delinquency rate for individually billed cards was 6.25 percent, data showed.

USDA was one of the worst agencies, though apparently DOD distorts the picture.

Boom Over for Organic Dairy?

That's the theme of this NYTimes article, describing farms which went organic in 2005 or 6, and now are having problems. I never got into the business details of our farm, so I'm not sure who we shipped our milk to and whether there was a contract. I suspect not. Apparently organic dairies have contracts with their processor, presumably to ensure compliance with organic standards?

One of the problems the organic people run into is the math of a niche market. Generally speaking, the bigger the market, the more fluctuations will damp themselves out. (Unless, that is, you have a bubble like the subprime or dot-com ones--then the bigger the market the harder the fall.) So the article mentions the possibility of selling milk into the conventional milk market, or trying to sell locavore/raw milk.

One result of the problems will be the less efficient organic producers will fail, meaning the average size will increase, moving organic dairy further away from the organic ideal.

[Updated: Of course things aren't good for conventional dairy either, as this LA Times story says.]

[Updated II: John Phipps comments on the same article. I'm struck by the fact that even for organic dairies the cost of [bought, I assume] feed is 50 percent or more of total costs.]

NRCS Gets Dinged

A couple pieces of bad news for NRCS:

1. EWG says they could improve the job they're doing with EQIP in the states in the Mississippi watershed. "We found that, up to now, EQIP has not been deployed as effectively as it could be in these 10 states. The methods used to decide how to spend EQIP dollars within a state and which farmers will get those dollars are more likely to result in diffuse and fragmented efforts to reduce pollution from farms, rather than the focused and coordinated effort needed to clean up the Mississippi River and its tributaries."
2. Farmgate reports on a court case USDA lost in Iowa, having to do with the definition of "wetlands" under swampbuster rules:
   

   In his summary of the case, Iowa State’s McEowen says, “So, in essence, USDA harassed the plaintiff with bogus wetland violation claims for many years which placed the plaintiff within the potential peril of bankruptcy and continued to maintain its bogus claims in an attempt to avoid paying the plaintiff’s attorney fees.” He says that is not new, and quotes another case, in which the court said, “…there is no worse statute than one misunderstood by those who interpret it.”

   McEowen suggests that USDA should send its staff and attorneys to some wetland education classes, and if courts keep making USDA reimburse land owners for their attorney fees, then USDA may learn what the law is.

First We Kill, No, Intimidate All Lawyers

That's what law prof Ann Althouse seems to advocate as the tag-end of her latest comment on the Sotomayor nomination.

A Video Is Worth a Thousand Locavore Words

Ann Althouse has a link to a video from gapminder.org which shows how the world has changed in the last 200 years, both in income and health. I may be wrong, but I attribute these gains to the work of human reason working across boundaries, which seems to me to be the antithesis of the locavore movement.

MIDAS and Recovery

Finally got back to the USDA Recovery links. FSA has one, which includes a page with this short piece of info:

$50 million in funding has been provided to support FSA IT stabilization and modernization. $31 million is planned for stabilization and $19 million is planned for modernization (MIDAS).

The Stabilization effort includes improving the management, monitoring and performance of the current web-based system networks, hosting environments, applications, databases and reporting capabilities needed to support customer business transactions on USDA's Common Computing Environment.

MIDAS is an initiative to "Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems." Its objective is to streamline FSA business processes and develop an effective long-term IT system and architecture for FSA farm program delivery.

I'll try to do better in checking FSA, because I'm breathlessly awaiting the posting of further details of the expenditures for stablization and MIDAS.

True But Discouraging Words

From Reihan Salam at The American Scene:

As we all know, the tribe of blog readers is small and peculiar in a lot of ways.

The Limits of Public Input II

Here's the Open Gov site, which is accepting proposals for better and more transparent government. At the risk of sounding arrogant and condescending (okay, I am) it's amusing and dismaying to see proposals for releasing Kennedy assassination records and the true facts of 9/11, plus a bunch of other idiocies posted to it. (The best and most practical suggestion I saw was for each government web site to display its usage stats.)

NRCS Leaps Ahead Again

The government is now on You-Tube. I went there to check out what they had for agriculture--some Vilsack clips and this NRCS video on the farm bill. I have to say I prefer Susan Boyle, but NRCS should get some credit for being the first USDA agency to take advantage of the new deal.

And via Government Executive, this Nextgov article outlines the government's use of social media and plans for the future.

Government ID's

This piece at Government Executive outlines a proposal to replace the "Real ID" law. I'm particularly amused by this:

"The bill would eliminate a mandate for states to create a national information-technology system for sharing data. Instead, state departments of motor vehicles would have to "take appropriate steps" to determine a person does not have a license from another state."

Meanwhile this Federal Computer Weekly piece covers attempts to improve the ID's of first responders.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials hope a pilot program demonstrated today to make first responders' credentials interoperable across jurisdictions will expand nationwide.

Run by FEMA’s Office of National Capital Region Coordination (NCRC), the program encourages state and local officials and the companies that run critical infrastructures to ensure that their credentials comply with Federal Information Processing Standard 201.

And Equifax has its own proposal:

Equifax, the big credit agency that already knows more about your flea count than you do, wants to help.

It is developing a service that will let you create an online identity that can assert various “claims” that it will back up. To an online wine merchant, it might back you up when you say you are of legal age. If you are applying to open a bank account, the company might vouch for your entire profile, including name, address, birthday and Social Security number.

Personally, as a confirmed bureaucrat, I'd like one Federal ID card. But that's not possible in our society; we're too paranoid.