Plant a Farm in an Hour

My great grandfather did pretty good accumulating land in antebellum Illinois, but I doubt he ever had 60 acres of corn. Turns out John Deere has corn planters in the field which can do that much in an hour, with a new one in the works that can do 90 acres.

That's what John Phipps means by industrial farming. And it's why we have cheap calories.

A Measure of Interconnection

From the News from 1930 blog:

By use of radio links, any Bell system phone can now connect to about 30M of world's 34.5M phones in 25 countries, including most of Europe and parts of South America and Africa, and to several ocean liners at sea. US-Europe are connected by 4 radio channels and so can have 4 simultaneous conversations.

I wouldn't expect a great expansion of phones to have occurred before 1941, so in my lifetime. we've gone from 30,000,000 to at least 3,000,000,000 (this source says there's 2.1 billion cell phones in the world now--add another 900,000,000 for land lines--my guess.)

How Much Does Ag Contribute to Greenhouse Gases

Ezra Klein in the Post last week used 18 percent. Today the Meat Institute wrote a letter to the editor, saying Klein was using a global figure, which didn't apply to US emissions;

The Environmental Protection Agency concluded that in 2007, only 2.8 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions came from animal agriculture.

Meanwhile, at farmgate, I get this:

Agriculture contributes 6.7% of the total greenhouse gases emitted by the US, but the legislation so far does not penalize agriculture.

And Tom Philpott at Grist provides a useful explanation of the discrepancy between Klein and the Meat people (different denominators, different things included) and provides this ending:

So if Boyle’s 2.8 percent figure is off the mark, what percentage of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions does actually stem from meat production? Loglisci of The Center for a Livable Future says it’s hard to pinpoint. “As far as I know, no one has crunched the numbers to determine a comparable GHG emissions number for U.S. livestock,” he writes.

Working with a Johns Hopkins researcher, Loglisci compiled some rough numbers and came out with an estimate of about 9 percent—half of the global FAO number cited by Klein, but three times the figure pushed by Boyle. “And in real numbers, not percentages, U.S. livestock production’s GHG contribution could still be the largest in the world,” Loglisci writes.

Complexity in Governmen

One of the things the right likes to do is create graphics showing the interrelationships of all the pieces of complex legislation, like health care. Fine--a picture is always good.

But here's a link to a post with a picture showing the complexity of the oversight(?) suffered by one department. No one, neither Republican nor Democrat, is pushing to revamp Congressional oversight, yet it's probably the first step to a more effective government.

Tomatoes

Have I mentioned we have fresh tomatoes from the garden? They're 2-3 later than some years, but just as tasty. Of course, we're also feeding Bambi as well. And perhaps suffering some vandalism/theft--not sure about tha.

I Like Michael Pollan's Article!

Meryl Streep's new movie continues to get ink, as Michael Pollan uses it to set up an article on cooking in the NYTimes Mag, which is summarized as: "How American cooking became a spectator sport, and what we lost along the way."

I like it, amazingly enough. This quote:

Not that I didn’t also owe Swanson, because we also ate TV dinners, and those were pretty good, too. [Admitting to owing Julia Child for teaching his mother to cook better.]

And most of all, this quote, which should replace Pollan's famous seven word message from "in Defense of Food" with the three word motto:

“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

For some reason, it rings a bell with John Phipps post on music, the virtures of creating it. For both food and music, we find the things we can buy superior to those we can make.

NAIS Comments

I tried to submit NAIS comments today, but regulations.gov seems to be either overloaded or not working well. So, for what they're worth, my two cents:

Comments on NAIS

I grew up on a small dairy/poultry farm so I can understand some of the concerns of the small producers. As a retired bureaucrat I also see the fix APHIS finds itself in. It seems to me APHIS is stuck--there's no way to go forward on your current lines because the opposition is too vocal, too numerous, and too dug in. You can't get the participation without paying the freight; you can't get the dollars from Congress to pay the freight because you can't get a broad consensus in the field.You need something different to break the logjam.

I think there are historical analogues that can be instructive. In the 1960's USDA maintained a food and feed facility directory. In the case of a nuclear attack USDA field offices would have been responsible for inventorying what was left and coordinating its use.Thank goodness it was never put to the test.

Also in the 50's and 60's we had the fluoridation controversy and the fight over whether seatbelts should be required in cars. In both cases time has cooled the flame of conflict, particularly as the older geezers died and the new generations came along. There are some issues where that's the best you can do in the U.S.--the founding fathers didn't design the government for fast efficient action.

My suggestions:

1. First, you need a more accurate title. "National Animal Identification System" must have been invented by a bureaucrat. It sucks. No wonder small farmers are scared of it. In the U.S. we rarely have national systems for anything, not in the sense the French or Japanese have a national education system, for example. What you have under the title "NAIS" is a typical federal mish-mash of organizations and standards which is successfully creating confusion. A better name for what you're doing might be: "Standards for Animal Identification Systems"--more descriptive and more accurate, and possibly less scary for NAIS opponents.
2. Rely on the USDA field offices (i.e., FSA and NRCS) to create and maintain a national list of names and addresses of people and legal entities who are raising animals and the types of animals raised. There shouldn't be much additional work required, because they already should have all farmers in the Service Center Information Management system. You'd need to get animal type information added and give access to APHIS field personnel. The offices should also try to increase their efforts to give farmers their own access info.
3. Add layers to the geographical information system (GIS) used by NRCS and FSA to reflect the addresses recorded in item 2. Ideally separate animal types by layer, so one view shows all cattle ranchers, another all sheep, etc.
   

The idea would be, after items 2 and 3 are complete, if there's a report of a disease occurrence in hogs, say H1N1 flu, you could display the locations of all hog farmers within a radius of 30 miles, 100 miles, or whatever and have a listing of their phone numbers and email addresses to use in making contact. Time required: minutes, leaving you 47 hours to work the list. This seems to me to be easily doable and it gives you a national quick response system with, I hope, a minimal intrusion on the concerns of the No-NAIS people.

My comments on the remaining issues: think tiers and 6 degrees of connection.

By "tiers" you apply different rules for producers the products of whose animals may be exported than those which sell to neighbors. (Just as OSHA applies different rules for large factories than small shops.) You apply different rules for animals whose birth is separated by 6 steps from death to consumption than those which only have 2 steps.

Finally, I think you may be relying too much on the idea of identifying animals for small farmers That was the only way to go back in the days of tuberculosis and brucellosis, pushing paper, and IBM punch card sorters. But these days, when schools have moved from sending letters home to parents to automated calling and tweets, you should be flexible and innovative.

The Accounting of a Local Farmer

Stonehead posts a detailed account of the costs of raising pigs. Any pig farmers can check it out, but these sentences are indicative:

We do not include labour, a profit margin or taxes in the cost as we’re running a business-like “hobby” and not a business.

We aim to recover the costs of working the croft, while feeding ourselves from it and maintaining it.

If we were to run the croft as a business, the additional costs would be unrecoverable and we’d not be able to keep it on.

For Stonehead doing what one loves is reward enough for labor. It's an enviable situation to be in, if not so rewarding after hours of hard outside work dealing with some farm emergency.

More on Banking Than on Food

Floyd Norris has an interesting piece on the revision of economic statistics in the NYTimes

"In the new treatment, it appears Americans are spending more on financial services and insurance — $823 billion a year at the current rate, or 8.2 percent of personal consumption spending — than they are on food and beverages to be consumed at home — $788 billion, or 7.9 percent."

Note the $823 billion is much more than we spend on national security. Where's William Jennings Bryan and his Cross of Gold speech?

Wince-Making Words

I didn't really need this image implanted in my mind, from a Post article on the heavy truck traffic on I-81 (Shendandoah Valley north to Harrisburg, Scranton, Binghamton, Syracuse):

"To be blunt: If you're driving a car and you have a truck in front and a truck behind and a truck passing you, it's not difficult to determine who the jelly in the sandwich is if things go bad," said Lon Anderson, spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic.