The Funniest Sentence Today

From Angry Drunk Bureaucrat, part of his guide to Pittsburgh for the G-20:

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History is noted for its collection of old fossils, which make up the core of the local Democratic Committee.

Read the whole thing--he's in rare form.

White House Garden Video

Via Obamafoodorama, the White House has released a video on its garden. It's a puff piece, including a clip from the Victory Garden planted in 1943. Sam Kass observes that garden was over-hyped, as the reality turned out to be rather small, smaller than Michele's.

The video includes a time-lapse sequence of the garden, up through July. Kass claims it had produced over 200 pounds of vegetables by sometime in July. I'm not sure how impressive that is, but I give them credit for keeping it going. Many new gardeners give out by mid-summer.

I can't resist a couple snarks criticisms, though:

• Kass talks about amending the soil, apparently to adjust the N P K figures. What I don't see is the first and most important step in the organic gardening ideology: adding organic matter. If I recall, the USDA garden got some compost from Pennsylvania. But the White House garden's soil looks rather orange/red, not nice and dark brown, throughout the video. I'm not even clear whether they tilled the sod under, or removed it.
• someone kept the garden pretty well weed free. But it wasn't through the use of the second primary element of organic gardening: mulch. Mulch adds organic matter, and keeps down erosion when we have the strong rains often associated with our thunder storms. But it looks as if the WH just weeds and weeds. I hope that's Malia and Sasha doing the weeding--weeding is educational and character building. That's what my Calvinistic and Lutheran forebears would have said, but mostly it's just hard on the back, which is all the more reason young backs should pain, rather than the middle-aged guys from the Park Service who did the original tilling.
• back to organic matter. As I say, that's the key to organic gardening, and any good garden is only as good as its compost pile, at least that's what the organic nuts gardeners say. So where's the White House compost pile or bin? That should be front and center in this operation.
• where's the tomato count? The video doesn't go into August, so you can't tell how many plants they had, but tomatoes are the best argument for home gardens you can have.
• where's the fall plantings? By now they should be planting for fall, unless they're going to cheat again by buying seedlings.
• and the video could be better.
  

I have to think there's a lot of PR in this. And I can sympathize: Michele wouldn't be the first beginning gardener to have grand plans for all the work she and her girls are going to do, only to find out as the summer goes on that real life intervenes with other priorities. You have only to look at a handful of the plots in the community garden where my wife and I garden.

Cavalry in Poland

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries puts up a picture of her father-in-law, a cavalry officer in the Polish Army on the eve of WWII.

The picture can stand for many things, but it reminds me how long it takes to make changes. Yes, there were cavalry fights in WWI, but very few and none significant (unless you count camel cavalry and T.E. Lawrence). But here, 21 years later, a whole generation, a sovereign nation with brains and know how is still putting cavalry in the field. (As a side note, the Poles you remember were the ones who originally figured out the German Enigma machines, enabling Ultra to become a decisive factor in beating Hitler. ) Of course, the German Wehrmacht still moved by horsepower, but I don't think they had cavalry.

Prediction--Vera Lynn

I suspect there's enough old fogies like me to see her rise on the charts in the US. I'm too cheap to buy her records but YouTube is good.

Voluntary Production Adjustment

From the 1930 blog:

Editorial: The “buy-a-bale-of-cotton” movement now promoted in Georgia would be another failed attempt to artificially support a commodity by taking it off the market, as previously tried unsuccessfully with coffee, cotton, and wheat. The “success” of the earlier buy-a-bale movement in 1914 is mythical; cotton prices didn't peak until 1917 due to heavy wartime demand and short crops.

Worst Pun of the Day

From 1930 blog:

[Note: I believe Dept. of Fisheries later produced educational film with Dean Martin titled That's A Moray.] US Dept. of Agriculture has extensive department producing educational films, including T.B or not T.B., Insect Allies, That Brush Fire, and Persimmon Harvesting and Storage in China.

The EU Parliament and the Senate

From Farm Policy, a special Roger Waite piece on the next commissioner of Ag in the EU:

In that sense, it is worth recalling that the European Parliament is unlike almost any other Parliament in the world in that voting sometimes divides down Party lines (and there are now 6 big Party groups), but it also sometimes divides along national lines. [In my experience, farm policy initiatives tend to be voted along national lines.] Anyway, looking at past battles in the US Congress, we may now face additional divisions based on Committee loyalties, i.e. Ag Committee vs Budget or Environment or Development Aid Committee.

That's the way the Senate works on agriculture, although given the breadth of the farm bill it's sometimes obscured.

The Free Rider Problem in Agriculture

Back before I was born farmers experimented with voluntary cooperation in limiting production. Unfortunately it's hard to sustain because of the free rider problem. Here's another instance from the 1930 blog:

Minnesota Gov. T Christianson says doubts success of Farm Board campaign to reduce wheat acreage; approach should start at the smalller cooperative units and build up rather than working top down from national agency, and should be focused on substituting other crops such as flax for wheat. Requiring farmers to restrict output of all products would be strongly opposed as it “would permanently subordinate agriculture to industry,” since farmers wouldn't be able to produce a surplus to sell abroad as industry can.

How To Mislead With Statistics

From treehugger, a Lester Brown article on how to rethink food production for a world of eight billion:

"The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually."

This sounds like disaster in the works. What Mr. Brown doesn't do is compare the rates of increase of population and food production on the same graph. Looking at a table of world population growth, we see that in 1962 and 1963, the rate of population increase was 2.19 percent. But those were the only years in which the rate was over 2.1 percent. So between 1950 and 1990 food production outstripped population. Now since 1990 the rate of population increase has declined steadily, reaching 1.25 in 2000 and 1.11 percent this year. So, once again, the rate of food production is higher than population.

Although this part of the piece is misleading, he has an interesting discussion of various techniques, especially doublecropping, which might be possible. And he doesn't hit the locavore/organic drum at all.

Now USDA Messes With the Definition of a "Month"

Not content with defining "beef" and "veal", the USDA decides there are 13 months:

"Please be advised that 2008 13th month data has been applied to the FAS U.S. Foreign Agricultural Trade Database "

(The Foreign Ag Service has redone their statistics database here and "13th month" is a term for a catchall of corrections and late reports.
[Updated with the link I intended]