NRCS and FSA--Testimony from FSA

I quote from a legislative statement dated today, the testimony of Mr. Lohr:

Both FSA and NRCS are in the process of upgrading their technology and business processes, FSA through the Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems (MIDAS) project and NRCS through the Conservation Delivery Streamlining Initiative. Having FSA administer conservation programs would go a long way towards assisting NRCS in reaching its Streamlining Initiative goals of reducing field staff administrative workloads by 80%. It would also enable their field staff to reach the goal of spending 75% of their time in the field providing conservation assistance to farmers and ranchers. NRCS has indicated concern with the administrative burden on field office technical staff from expanded roles for contract development and management. NRCS’s Streamlining Initiative encourages a move to a “natural resource centric view” concentrating on identifying and solving resource problems and moving away from a “financial assistance centric view.”

The NRCS Streamlining Initiative highlighted as one of its top objectives the implementation of programs through alternative staffing and delivery approaches designed around more efficient business processes to minimize the non-technical workload on field staff.

Now is the time to make the IT changes to enhance FSA’s administrative and NRCS’s technical capabilities .For example, FSA and NRCS use different GIS software programs, ArcGIS and Toolkit, respectively. This is not practical. It is extremely inefficient to develop and maintain two USDA systems to administer farm and conservation programs. We can no longer afford these inefficiencies.

The third from the last sentence surprises me.  So much for the work of Kevin Wickey.

What Does Extension Do?

Here's an article on the shift of an extension director over to FSA, which provides some information on what extension actually does, at least in Iowa.

A Bit of History

Brad DeLong has been running a series of posts related to WWII.  Here he quotes Neville Chamberlain's speech when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.  I found this sentence striking:

"Every man and woman in this country who remembers the fate of the Jews and the political prisoners in Austria must be filled today with distress and foreboding."

McArdle and Normalizing Children

Megan McArdle is back from her honeymoon and worrying about normalizing children: human interventions to adjust the height, and other characteristics, of our children.  As a very tall woman, she tentatively plumps for normalizing:

"If I were presented with a virtually riskless way to let my daughters buy clothing off the rack, and blend into the classroom a little better?  Frankly, no child of mine is ever going to have a brilliant athletic future in front of her.  So why not?  I'm pretty sure she could fight the patriarchy just as easily without a 35 inch inseam."

I'm bugged by the middle sentence and would have commented but I come late to the party so I'll post here instead:

• she does not allow for the genetics her daughter will receive from her husband.  He may be a total klutz, but maybe not.
• even if neither parent contributes much in the way of coordination, I'm reading the sentence, perhaps wrongly, as saying Ms McArdle looks down on athletics, at least as it pertains to her and hers. I'm hearing in it an echo of the attitude I get from some older relatives of mine: I'm no good on computers and technical type stuff.  That drives me up the wall. Now if they'd say: the world is full of wondrous things and my time on the planet is limited, so I choose not to invest the time needed to learn the ins and outs of Windows and the Internet--that I could understand.  
• so I guess I'd wish McArdle to say: while I'm not good at athletics, I'll try to keep my daughter's eyes open to athletics, just as I keep them open to a possible career in nuclear physics.

Balls and Strikes

Andrew Pincus at TPM reports on an exchange with Ms. Kagan on the famous Roberts definition of a judge's role: call balls and strikes.  I'm disappointed she didn't go further with the metaphor.  Anyone who grew up when I did was told the strike zone was between the knees and the armpits, and over the plate.  Anyone who watches baseball on TV today knows that's not the way umpires see it today.  And there's no consistency from umpire to umpire.  The best the pitcher and the batters can hope for is consistency through the day.

Reinventing the Wheel at the Federal Government

Buying in bulk.  That's the new idea, which is really an old idea.  If I remember correctly, Al Gore's Reinventing Government emphasized procurement reform, in part by giving government credit cards out to the field.  The idea was you cut the paperwork, the procurement delays, and you make government smaller and more responsive.  Of course that reform ran into problems, particularly because no one was watching over the use of the credit cards, so they got misused.  Now the Obama administration thinks we can save money by moving more of the procurement action back to GSA.  Perhaps.  And perhaps 15 years from now another administration will try again to decentralize procurement.

Obesity at Lake Woebegon

From Farm Policy, quoting an AP article on the new obesity report:

The article stated that, “The new survey shows that 84 percent of parents believe their children are at a healthy weight, even though nearly a third of children and teens are considered obese or overweight.”

Good for the White House--Composting

Obamafoodorama posts on a video showing the White House compost operation. Although I sometimes mock parts of the food movement, composting is right down my alley.  It fits the Calvinistic/Lutheran piety I was brought up with: waste not, want not.  Inevitably if you're cooking there is some waste, trimmings and inedible parts of plants (although I eat baked potatoes skins and all).  And the larger the operation the more likely you'll have some spoilage.  So I like to see people composting, even though it's difficult to do the way the books say.  You don't always have the right mixture of materials and it can be difficult to keep the moisture and oxygen at the right level.

But all that said, composting is a good thing.

Obesity Is Sam Walton's Fault, Not Farmers

A report cited at Barking Up the Wrong Tree says there's a correlation between Walmart Supercenters and the rate of obesity.  (Of course correlation is not cause and in this instance there's probably a whole set of causal factors affecting obesity and the siting of Walmarts.)

Collision and Comprehensive From Different Insurance Companies?

Would it make sense for me to get my collision insurance from GEICO and my comprehensive liability insurance from Allstate?  (The companies agree it doesn't make sense for me to get my homeowners and auto insurance from different companies; they just disagree on which of them should provide both.)

That's the situation we have with crop insurance and disaster payment programs.  GAO recently released a report pointing out problems because of the different rules, in particular FSA gets reports of disaster damage long after the fact.  So they recommend:

To better ensure that payments under the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments Program compensate farmers who experienced eligible crop losses, we recommend that the Secretary of Agriculture implement procedures so that FSA county officials are notified at the time of crop insurance claims for disaster-related losses so those officials have an opportunity to verify that crop disaster payment applicants experienced losses because of an eligible cause.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't make much sense to me.  Data flowing the other way, from FSA to the insurance companies makes a little sense--you've got one source which theoretically can propagate the data to each company.  But having the data flow from the companies to FSA is problematic.

An addendum: this FSA notice shows the problems involved with having different shares reported to RMA and FSA.