Memorial Day

Garrison Keillor at Wolf Trap last night spoke in memory of an Anoka, MN man, 2 years younger than he, who died in Vietnam.

I'm old enough to remember going to the cemetery on Memorial Day to clean the graves of my grandparents.  With the popularity of cremation such ceremonies will dwindle away.  Maybe that's why college students these days supposedly have less empathy for others.

Crop Insurance Administration

I wonder what the Congressional Research Service or GAO might do with a study of the administrative costs of crop insurance.

I wonder if any FSA CED's would volunteer to administer crop insurance policies for what the companies average? 

The Food Movement and the Tea Party Movement: Brothers Under the Skin?

I think there are a number of parallels between the Tea Party movement versus the Food Movement (as defined by Pollan):

1. Both have producerist strains: true value is not produced on Wall Street nor on big industrial farms; for foodies true value is produced by small family farmers.
2. Both see international institutions as antagonists.  The food movement attacks international corporations, the tea party attacks international government, the UN, the north American compact, etc
3. Both elevate local values over national and national over global values.
4. Both draw, I think, from the middle and upper middle classes, mostly white. The Tea Partiers may be a tad more suburban and red state, the foodies a tad more urban and blue state.
5. Both have anti-technology strains.
6. Both see the American people as innocent, passive victims.  The Tea Partiers give no hint that the government they dislike and the programs and institutions they would kill have been endorsed by both parties in popular elections going back for decades.  The foodies give no hint that the obesity they deplore and the food they would trash result from the choices of consumers and families over decades. 
7. Both seem to be nostalgic romantic movements, seeking to turn back the clock to an earlier time, at least in selected aspects.
8. Both are suckers to con-men with dubious schemes, such as vertical farming or the return to the gold standard.
   

Peterson on Payment Limitation

Today's FArm Policy led with this:

The Washington Insider section of DTN noted yesterday (link requires subscription) that, “Shifting away from direct payments [related graph] would go a long way toward resolving the problem of farm payment limits, which Ag panel Chairman Peterson sees as the main reason for opposition to federal farm program. ‘A lot of the huge payment issues would go away if you don’t have direct payments,’ Peterson said. Direct payments, he says, are what generates ‘all the opposition because we make payments to people who aren’t farming [such as] people who own land [but] who live in New York City.’

I'm not sure I follow his logic.  Yes, there's a difference between saying Bigshot farmer got $X in taxpayer money and saying he got $X in taxpayer subsidized insurance indemnities, but it's not that big a one. Certainly it won't fool the smart people in the food movement, and I doubt their friends in the mass media.  Maybe I'm wrong--twill be interesting to see. 

I believe I'm correct in saying, as a general rule, the people who get indemnity payments and the people who get direct payments should be the same people: i.e., those who have an interest in the crop.  There may be minor differences in how the rules work and there may be major differences in the administration of the rules, but again we'll see.

Payment LImitation and Crop Insurance

Some random thoughts triggered by EWG's publication of crop insurance data and the various testimonies before the House Ag committee on the trade-offs between FSA farm programs and insurance.

One thing not yet mentioned: payments under most FSA programs are subject to limitation, crop insurance is not.  So it would be logical for big farmers to push for putting more benefits under the crop insurance umbrella rather than FSA.  (What does that mean--raising benefits, cutting the loss needed to trigger payments.)  Cutting against that logic is the fact that cotton and rice producers seem to be the biggest fans of the traditional FSA programs, and not of crop insurance.

It might be possible to apply a payment limitation, or indemnity limit, to crop insurance--continue to subsidize the administrative costs and indemnities up to a given figure.  After all, FDIC insures savings accounts only up to $200,000 ($100,000 permanent); car insurance limits the liability amounts; homeowners insurance limits liability.

Overpaid Bureaucrats

Yes, I consider Federal Reserve members to be bureaucrats.  And I mean the title sarcastically.  See this via Wonkbook from the Wall Street Journal:


That means Ms. Yellen [paid $410,000 as chair of San Francisco Fed), who is President Barack Obama's nominee to be the next Fed vice chairman, would see her pay more than halved [to $179,700]  if she is confirmed to the post in Washington."

[Sorry, I blew the link.]

Discrimination Claims

AP has a story on a proposal to resolve claims of discrimination filed by Hispanics and women.

The Obama administration on Tuesday offered $1.3 billion to settle complaints from female and Latino farmers who say they faced discrimination from the Agriculture Department.
The proposal comes as Congress is poised to approve a $1.25 billion settlement with African-American farmers in a similar discrimination case. The agency also is negotiating with Native American farmers over another lawsuit.

The NY Times has a story on the Pigford claims.

Organic Grain Yields

From a farmgate post focused on the prices for organic soybeans and corn:

Singerman also reports several studies that indicate organic corn yields were 8 to 10% lower than conventional corn, and organic soybean yields were anywhere from 1% to 19% lower than conventional beans.

Here's the summary:

While price premiums for organic corn and soybeans may seem to be twice that of the prices of conventional crops, that relationship may be more coincidental than normal. Prices for both organic and conventional crops can be volatile, but they are set in different markets, they do not move in lock step with each other, and conventional crops cannot be substituted for organic crops meaning they are separate commodities.

Organic Milk

Had to buy milk today so I checked the coolers.  My Safeway has 7 coolers devoted to milk of various kinds (whole, reduced fat, organic, soy, etc. etc.).  Of the 7, 2 were organic, a proportion which surprised me a bit.  The Safeway doesn't serve the richest clientele in the richest county in the country; lots of immigrants live in the area, though many of those are doing well.  But 30 percent organic is pretty good market penetration.

And, although the taste tests in this Grist post were a bit inconclusive, supermarket organic milk came out pretty well.

Pollan in the NY Review of Books

Michael Pollan has a review article in the NY Review of Books.  Briefly he sees a "food movement"

Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids. 

He has problems with his facts and history in three cases

The dream that the age-old “food problem” had been largely solved for most Americans was sustained by the tremendous postwar increases in the productivity of American farmers, made possible by cheap fossil fuel (the key ingredient in both chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and changes in agricultural policies. Asked by President Nixon to try to drive down the cost of food after it had spiked in the early 1970s, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially) at any cost.

This is a repeat of an error from The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is wrong.  Butz didn't have this power, the legislation passed by Congress was a change, but in the long view not that big of a change, and the decisions Butz made to lower loan rates were reversed by his successor after he was fired and during President Ford's reelection campaign.

Again:

Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.

Did household income decline since 1970?  No. See this wikipedia article   Or see this for a quick view. Note he doesn't cite women's lib, which some of his readers might be supportive of.

And finally he twice refers to the White House "organic garden".  Wrong--Michelle's garden is not organic, though it leans that way. See Obamafoodorama.