A Dose of Reality

Nothing like disease to modify one's views. Dan Barber, an entrepreneurial restaurant owner and organic farmer near NYC, has a piece in today's Times. "Late blight" has hit tomatoes hard, apparently especially, heirloom varieties. So he writes this:

"The food community has a role to play, too — by taking another look at plant-breeding programs, another major fixture of our nation’s land-grant universities, and their efforts to develop new varieties of fruits and vegetables. To many advocates of sustainability, science, when it’s applied to agriculture, is considered suspect, a violation of the slow food aesthetic. It’s a nostalgia I’m guilty of promoting as a chef when I celebrate only heirloom tomatoes on my menus. These venerable tomato varieties are indeed important to preserve, and they’re often more flavorful than conventional varieties. But in our feverish pursuit of what’s old, we can marginalize the development of what could be new."

Mr. Barber even cites the extension people at Cornell

Break Up the Nationals

The Washington Nationals baseball team has been mocked for most of the year, but today they won their eighth straight. Who knows, perhaps President Obama will be able to invite them to the White House before his term is up?

NAIS and Food Facility Listings

In my comments on National Animal Identification System I suggested APHIS might ask FSA to do as they used to do with the food and facility listings maintained in case of nuclear disaster. Little did I realize that 20 years after the end of the cold war, we're still maintaining the data. But now FSA is moving to the GIS system. See this FSA notice. I applaud the move, though I've a qualm or two about the need for the data.

The National Nightmare Is Over

National Archives has a document for each day. Today's document is Nixon's resignation letter.

Sharp Phd's

I wonder what went wrong in this quote--it can't be taken literally (from a Treehugger article on how Thai rice farmers preserve genetic diversity):

“They take into consideration [when selecting seed] a multitude of factors which vary annually, including soil type, elevation, and temperature,” according to the study done by Barbara A. Schaal, Ph.D., the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and her colleagues at Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

How do soil type and elevation vary annually?

Our Entrepreneurial Economy

Is the pride of free marketeers everywhere. That's as compared to the bureaucracy, as described in this quote about the response to an innovative idea:

"“It was just one thing after another,” he recalled. “I don’t want to speak ill of anyone’s [agency or organizational] culture, but the bottom line is that these people are committed to death. They’re encumbered by their own bureaucracy. It’s almost as if you went to the C.D.C. and said, ‘I have a cure for the common cold,’ and they said, ‘Oh, no thanks.’ ”

Of course, those who remember I'm a liberal with a soft spot for government bureaucracy willb suspicious of those brackets. And indeed, you should be. The words inside the brackets were originally: "company or corporate" and the quote is from this NYTimes article on the problems of getting private unemployment insurance or salary gap insurance.

Great News for Chinese Feminists

BBC reports China is instituting a pension system for farmers over age 60. Why is this good for feminists--because the preference for sons is, in part, a reflection of the need for someone to continue farming. Give farmers pensions and they'll accept daughters.

On Having Tomatoes Stolen

There's reasons not to garden (thieves for one) and the deeper reasons cited in this piece (satire of reasons for not gardening as given by different schools of thought).

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.)