Caruso Out

Doug Caruso resigned as Administrator, FSA. See DTN. No FSA press release but the website is updated.

The Power of the Purse

Via Farm Policy, Representative Lucas tried to cut off money for FSA to pass program participant info to IRS, to have them tell FSA if the AGI limit was exceeded. His try failed, but it's an example of how the power of the purse can determine policy. (I remember when House appropriations tried to block the salaries of the Deputy Administrator, State and County Operations and the assistant..)

Failure

From Nextgov:

Justice has been trying to develop a departmentwide case management system for the past 28 years. In 1982, it awarded a $9.6 million contract to Inslaw Inc., a small Washington company, to deploy a case management system called Promis at 22 U.S. attorneys offices. The contract became embroiled in a series of controversies, including allegations by the company that Justice appropriated its software without payment and provided it to Israeli intelligence agencies. Justice then withheld payment to Inslaw, which filed for bankruptcy in 1985.

It's another chapter in failed IT projects. ASCS/FSA at least did one reasonably successful project. (At least us DC bureaucrats thought it was, some county office people thought we had our heads in a dark place.)

Pardon a Geezer

From Amazon, a terabyte hard drive:

List Price:	$2,064.00
Price:	$89.99 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
You Save:	$1,974.01 (96%)

[Updated: Not sure where they got the start price for the drive, but it's cheaper than a 7.5 meg drive was back in 1994.]

1930 Again

It seems I'll probably end up posting regularly on the 1930 news (the summary of Wall Street Journal reportage). This time:

Editorial criticizing Dept. of Agriculture's forecast that wheat prices will be lower over the next 7 years. Suspicious this fits into Farm Board plan to reduce wheat acreage; says this is doomed to fail since foreign growers will take up slack and farmers will convert to other crops, with resulting pressure on those. Compares plan to “taking a part of the load from one end of the wagon and piling it on the other end.” No alternative plan suggested.

It's a reminder of the predecessors to the New Deal--in this case Hoover experimented with price supports without a production adjustment/supply management program in place. One item on my to-do list is to write on "supply management" for wikipedia.

McNamara 4; Palin 2

That's the score on the Washington Post op-ed page: 4 pieces on Robert McNamara and 2 on Gov. Palin.

It's an interesting contrast. They represent the extremes of the governmental types, even human types: McNamara the ultimate rationalist and Palin the opposite.

The End of Peanut Program

The peanut quota program had lasted for maybe 40 years was phased out in the early 2000's in favor of treatment like wheat and feed grain. I've blogged before on the effect of ending the tobacco program. From Farm Policy today comes an update on peanuts from Mississippi:

Elton Robinson reported yesterday at the Southeast Farm Press Online that, “One of the biggest benefits to growing peanuts in Mississippi has been the relative lack of disease pressure compared to other more established growing regions of the Southeast.

“That honeymoon period appears to be ending, according to Mike Howell, area Extension agronomist at Mississippi State University, who has peanut responsibilities for the state.

“Eight years ago, fewer than 4,000 acres of peanuts were planted in Mississippi. But when the 2002 farm bill did away with the quota system for peanuts, acreage started to climb.”

Yesterday’s article noted that, “The state averaged a little over 2 tons per acre in 2008, which places them near the top in average yield in the United States. Howell attributes that to ‘relatively low disease pressure. Until last year, we had been able to get by without spraying a lot of fungicide.’

“‘But it looks like the honeymoon period is over,’ Howell said. ‘We’re starting to see some diseases creep in on us. Up until now, we haven’t had the acreage to allow the inoculum to build up.’

So, as with tobacco, the government program had frozen the area of production. End the program and new areas and new farmers come into production. (It's probably relevant that Mississippi has an extremely low acreage of cotton this year--presumably some farmers switched from cotton to peanuts.)

A Really Surprising Sentence

From a surprising MSNBC article on AIDS in Haiti in which the news is very surprising because it's mostly good:

"More Haitians know about modes of transmission than high school students in the U.S.," Pape said.

Wisdom for the Day

From Dan Drezner, at the end of an interesting comparison of Iran and Honduras (both places where the right has assumed power over the left...):

"Bear in mind, however, that life never holds everything else constant."

Docking Tails and Hurting Animals [Updated]

Sometimes you have to practice tough love, whether it's with animals or humans. And we always have to learn. This post at Stonybrookfarm reminds me of both imperatives.

[Added: And here's a Slate piece of a few days ago on ringing free-range pigs and spaying. Some of the same issues.]