Post on Local Slaughterhouses

I'm late in putting this up--the Post had an article on the growth of small local slaughterhouses. It fits with my earlier post on the Creekstone beef outfit.

Rural Wages and Unemployment

A factoid buried in this Daily Yonder article, with a nice graphic showing wage levels in rural counties: some correlation between low wages and low unemployment.  For example, WV has high unemployment but the unionized (presumably) coal miners who are employed have high wages.

Natural Beef in New York City: Creekstone Farms

A long and interesting article in the Times today on Creekstone Farms, which is providing beef to a number of NYC's better restaurants.  An excerpt:

Close to a fourth of Creekstone’s meat is “natural,” meaning free from antibiotics and growth-producing hormones; cattle are given vegetarian feed and, as a quality-control measure, it is noted which ranch each came from. In 2005, after adopting stringent standards, the company won certification to provide its highest-end products to theEuropean Union, Japan and Korea.

“We want to know that the animals are raised responsibly,” said Riad Nasr, an executive chef at Minetta Tavern.

And customers do, too, because “they can’t trust the regulators,” said Malcolm M. Knapp, who heads a restaurant consulting company in Manhattan that bears his name. “These days, diners can use their phones right in the restaurant to check beef out on the Internet. And they do.”

It looks like a trend.  (Later on in the article they note the higher prices Creekstone has to charge.) There are those small livestock farmers who oppose NAIS, but there are those who are finding a niche by marketing a history along with the meat.  Maybe we'll end with a 3-tier system: the mass market meat, the quality market meat with a history, and the local market meat with a face.

Amish and Health Care Reform

The Amish have problems with insurance, as essentially the community self-insures.  Via Marginal Revolution, this article describes some of the complications they face, particularly as employers.  But the incidental information is interesting--who knew there was an Amish employer with over 150 employees?  And what does it do to Amish society to have an employer/employee relationship?

Using Technology as a Work-Around

Ajay Shah has a post on the use of cell-phones and texting to work around problems in taxi queues at the Bombay airport.

Comes the Revolution?

Say it isn't so: "“But we all thought blogging was going to transform academic life, and that didn’t really happen.”

Le Fooding and the Flymo

From Dirk Beauregarde, a long post on France and French (the language). The art of good food in France is now, if you can believe him, called "le fooding", following the pattern of creating a quasi-French word by adding "ing" to an English word.

And via Dirk, "hover mowers"   (as in hovercraft).

Now It's the Bureaucrats' Turn

Now health care reform has passed, it's the job of the bureaucrats to get to work.  My fervent hope is Obama and Sebelius are worrying about it already. (I have my doubts--politicians don't usually worry about nuts and bolts and implementation, particularly charismatic politicians, which I guess we can call Obama one again, now he's got a big victory.) If I were them I'd hire some people from MA who implemented Romneycare plus arm twist Mark McClellan into returning to government.  McClellan is the guy in the Bush administration who implemented Medicare Part D very successfully, given that the Dems were very much on the warpath as it was passed and in its early days.  But as time passed the criticism vanished, which is a good indication that McClellan is an effective bureaucrat.  There's nothing like having a bit of experience before starting a big job.

World's Richest Man-1930 Versus 2010

In 80 years we've moved from this:

World's richest man is the Nizam of Hyderabad, 45-year old monarch of 13M Indian Muslims. Fortune is estimated at over $2B; during the war he contributed over $50M to the British govt. He is said to have over $500M in gold in his treasury. On a visit to New Delhi two years ago, he traveled in a special train of 22 Pullman cars; his luggage was sent ahead in four special trains, one devoted to carrying part of his collection of 400 cars.

To this:

Carlos Slim Helu, a Mexican telecommunications tycoon, has earned the title as the world's richest man, worth an estimated $53.5 billion. A self-made billionaire, Helu holds a controlling interest in several Mexican telecommunications companies, including American Movil, the largest mobile phone business in Latin America. His net worth climbed $18.5 billion just in the past year.

Incidentally, one piece on Mr. Slim (whose father emigrated from Lebanon, said he was the first person from a developing country to be the richest man.  As the piece on the Nizam shows, that's not true.  If memory serves, before Bill Gates, a big shot from Borneo was also the richest.  Else an oil man from the Mid east.  I may be foolishly optimistic, but it's possible more rich people have "earned" their money, rather than being the beneficiary of unearned wealth.

We Beat the Obamas

To planting our spring garden.  My wife and I got our peas, onion sets, and some lettuce in the ground yesterday and this morning.  According to Obamafoodorama the White House garden has yet to be planted for spring. (Ground was broken for it this time last year.)  I've observed before they should be ahead of Reston: the White House is closer to the ocean and therefore somewhat warmer than we are.

To be fair, however, apparently they planted winter rye on some of the beds while still growing turnips, lettuce and arugula on other ground.  Rye is nice, rye is good.  We've never used it, too impatient.  But rye is good organic gospel; the roots improve the texture of the soil and when it's turned under, it adds organic matter. The problem with rye is, IMHO, to get the maximum benefit you have to let it grow some in the spring after it comes out of dormancy, meaning you get a late start on your garden, which doesn't work for us impatient types.


For the White House, for whom gardening is both personal and political, rye probably works okay.  After all doing the spring planting will certainly be another media event, requiring much coordination of staff and school(s).  And as any bureaucrat knows, coordination takes time.