Time to Reengineer Crop Insurance

I'm anxiously waiting for FCIC to adapt the strategy used in Kenya to insure crops--track seed and fertilizer purchases by cellphone to establish eligiblity, determine losses by geographic locale, and deposit indemnity payments to cellphone accounts.  See this post at the World Banks blog.  This would tie in neatly with the cellphone disaster reporting I mentioned in my previous post.

I'm in danger of having my tongue in cheek on these sort of posts, but the reality is that as phone become capable the potential for major changes in business processes grows. The only problem is that humans mostly don't like change.

Suggestion for USDA--Ushahidi Disaster and Crop Reporting

Here is a description of Ushahidi applications (briefly, it's a web process to accumulate and display geographic data provided by cellphone reports--used in reporting disasters in Kenya and Haiti).

For USDA--why not adopt similar applications to assemble crop yield and damage reports, supplementing existing reporting systems?

NRCS Musings

Here's an audit report on NRCS.  Sustainable Ag has a post on the Senate Ag appropriations hearings, and Sec. Vilsack said:

In addition, Vilsack reminded Subcommittee members that the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which administers the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and EQIP, had been “under the cloud of an audit because it didn’t oversee and manage its resources effectively. We tried to do too much too soon, and now we have to be accountable to the taxpayers,” Vilsack said. “We don’t want people who aren’t qualified to get money under the program.”

Now I'm going to indulge in some dangerous speculation, dangerous because I really don't understand the audit nor do I know for sure that NRCS is in a worse situation than other parts of USDA, like FSA.  So the following is worth what you pay for it:

Historically Soil Conservation Service and then NRCS was an educational agency, teaching farmers how to conserve their land and water, developing and installing good conservation practices on the land.  I worked with them in the late 80's, as they were suffering from the shock of assuming some regulatory burdens by enforcing "conservation compliance".  That's the requirement that farmers not drain wetlands or cultivate highly erodible land without a conservation plan in effect.  Violation of the requirement was intended to make the farmer ineligible for USDA program benefits.  To oversimplify, the requirement has been watered down and, at least in the 90's, auditors were very dubious of how well NRCS and FSA were doing in implementing the requirement.

Through my time at agriculture, FSA would write the checks (actually CCC sight drafts) for conservation programs.  In recent years NRCS has been given responsibility for some programs, including responsibility for issuing payments.  My guess (here's the speculation) is that because NRCS didn't have the experience with the process, and perhaps because they had to rush to implement it, they didn't do it right the first time.  (Which is another instance of my rule: "you never do it right the first time".)  Hence the problematic audit.

From the OIG's Management Challenges report: "In 2002, the Secretary gave NRCS additional responsibilities to implement newly mandated conservation programs that deliver significantly more financial assistance to producers. NRCS has yet to establish the necessary management controls and processes to effectively administer and manage these new programs."

Vote for Murray Hill

If you're in the Maryland suburbs and Chris Van Hollen is your congressman, get a real representative.  (Dr. Soltan saves me the trouble of linking directly to the Post article.)

The Reality of Hens

The romanticism of keeping a few hens meets the realities in this short piece at Treehugger.

A Tale of Two Organizations

The NY Times today carries article on two organizations:

1. the Kansas City school system, which apparently has suffered from a total lack of leadership, so that now it has to close half its schools. "But a closer look at the school board’s recent history reveals a chaotic, almost nonfunctioning body that put off making tough choices and even routine improvements for generations."
2. Lehman Brothers, which is kaput. "According to the report, Lehman used what amounted to financial engineering to temporarily shuffle $50 billion of troubled assets off its books in the months before its collapse in September 2008 to conceal its dependence on leverage, or borrowed money."

This encapsulates some of my thinking about organizations: The free market is fine for things and services that can be measured and priced, but it is subject to manipulation, fraud, and deceit.  Government is for services which can't be measured and priced, often because benefits and/or costs would overlap the bounds of any market, but it is subject to inefficiency, fraud, and corruption.

Senate "Virility" Lost Long Time Ago

From the 1930 blog:

Editorial: The Senate, by its "absurd rules" giving a single Senator the power to block any pending legislation for as long as his physical strength holds out, has "robbed itself of parliamentary virility." In most recent example, Sen. Thomas of Oklahoma took the floor on midnight of Tuesday last week to move for investigation of the oil industry, and held it until Congress adjourned, blocking action on several important measures without accomplishing anything.

Persistence, or Just Showing Up

Who was it who said: "most of life is just showing up"?  Well Sen. Lincoln keeps showing up, and the latest bill passed by the Senate includes her disaster provisions (from Farm Policy):

“Also added to the bill is a $1.5 billion disaster aid package for the 2009 crop year being pushed by Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark. Farmers would be eligible if they suffered a crop disaster or are located in counties declared disaster areas that had at least one crop suffer a 5 percent yield or quality loss due to the disaster, the bill states. Payments would equal up to 90 percent of the farmers’ direct payments for 2009.”

House Ag and IT in USDA/FSA

House Ag committee held a hearing on the status of USDA and FSA IT, including GIS.  Only the opening statements of the witnesses are available online.  The USDA CIO and FSA Administrator testified.  Much of their statements sounded like 5, 10 or 15 years ago, addressing the same issues of outmoded equipment, stovepipe systems, decentralized chaos among the agencies.  The second session had the National Farmers Union, NASCOE, NAFEC, the National Association of Conservation Districts and the National States GIS council. 

I found the second session more interesting:  One question--why wasn't the Farm Loan organization (the old FmHA specialists) represented?  (To show how slowly things move in USDA, note I'm referring to an organization (FmHA) which disappeared 16 years ago.)  They certainly have IT concerns, although the Administrator seemed to say their systems were in the best shape of any.  A surprise--the NASCOE rep said GIS products were the single biggest workload item. An unlikely request--the National GIS rep asked for dedicated money for the NAIP (aerial photos/GIS) separate from FSA money, but was very complimentary of the Salt Lake City staff.  I wonder why that was--is it possible that because the Aerial Photography Field Office in Salt Lake is the only FSA office which produces real, tangible products (setting checks to producers aside), that it's easier for them to take a businesslike approach to its operations?

Al Kamen and Bureaucrats

Al Kamen in the Post reports on the end of Filegate (if you don't remember, you're lucky--a complete waste of brain cells).  Judge Lamberth calls it a bureaucratic snafu of no significance: "there's no there there."  (Lamberth is remembered unfondly by Dems as a Jesse Helms protege and a member of the panel which put Mr. Starr in as special prosecutor, so it's safe to say he's not usually favorable to Clinton.)

In the same column he has an interesting followup--in 2008 the Census Bureau reported we were exporting goods to Iran which were supposedly prohibited.  Now it turns out some of this was misreporting:  Census asked for a 2-letter country code and people thought that Ireland or Iraq might be coded: "IR", which is the Iran code.  ("IN" and "IQ" were right, in case you wondered.)  A reminder of the problems of collecting data.  One reason I suspect you see drop-down lists of states when you're filling out an address online is that people get confused: is "AK" for Arkansas; is "MS" for Minnesota?