Men and Machines

Confirming what I said in a recent post about the difference in cultures::
Dana Milbank talks about Israeli security using people versus US security using machines:  their version costs about 8 times per passenger what ours does.  And the NYTimes runs a piece on the many robots being developed for our armed forces.

Organic Dairy--How to Judge

A set of bullet points from a study of organic dairy:

• The average cow on organic dairy farms provides milk through twice as many, markedly shorter lactations and lives 1.5 to 2 years longer than cows on high-production conventional dairies;
• Because cows live and produce milk longer on organic farms, milking cow replacement rates are 30% to 46% lower, reducing the feed required and wastes generated by heifers raised as replacement animals;
• Cows on organic farms require 1.8 to 2.3 breeding attempts per calf carried to term, compared to 3.5 attempts on conventional farms;
• The enhanced nutritional quality of milk from cows on forage based diets, and in particular Jersey cows, significantly reduces the volume of wastes generated on organic dairy farms; and
• The manure management systems common on most organic farms reduce manure methane emissions by 60% to 80%, and manure plus enteric methane emissions by 25% to 45%. 

I've some quibbles: how does quality of milk reduce volume of wastes? What's unique about organic manure management? (Presumably the organic dairies are small enough to spread manure on the fields, while the non-organic are too big for that?)  3.5 breeding attempts strikes me as high, particularly if we're talking actual inseminations. 

But my bigger criticism is that these don't seem to me to be the right metrics.  What would be right?  Taking a dairy-wide view over years, standardizing the units for both conventional and organic. For example, take a 10-cow dairy (i.e., 10 milkers, plus appropriate replacements) over 10 years.  What's the total feed input and its cost, what's the total output of milk, and meat over the 10 years, what's the total manure output and their related emissions?  Throw in some metrics for quality of milk (is more fat better--it used to be but maybe not now).  Once you do that comparison you can proceed to the advantages of large versus small, as in the manure issue.

John Phipps Disses Vertical Farming

No surprise here--John states the obvious, the obvious except to a few enthusiasts.

Thoughts on the Return from Farming

This is an excerpt from a farmgate post on the economics of corn in Illinois:

With the crop contributing $321 from a 151 bushel per acre yield on continuous corn and $386 from a 161 bushel yield on rotated corn, a producer has to further estimate a return to labor, management, and land. The Purdue economists estimate $20 for USDA Direct Payments.
From that income, the economists deduct about $80 for machinery replacement, about $15 for drying and handling, and about $55 for family and hired labor. Their cash rent estimate is $167 per acre, which leaves a $13 per acre earning for continuous corn and a $93 per acre earning for rotated corn. Those numbers could quickly turn negative with higher cash rent, higher fertilizer prices, seed prices, a lower marketing price, or any combination of those.

 Some random thoughts:  

• Jane Smiley wrote a book called "A Thousand Acres"; the center of which was a thousand acre farm.  That's a nice round number, and Washington bureaucrats like me prefer to deal with nice round numbers.  So assume a 1,000 acre family farm.  According to this analysis, their return is $167,000 for the land,$55,000 for labor, and maybe $15,000 profit, giving a $235,000 total cash income before taxes, of which $20,000, or 10 percent, is farm program payments.  What strikes me is this is a reaffirmation of my mother's saying of long ago: farmers would do better to sell out and put the money in the bank.  1,000 acres at $8,000 an acre is $8 million, earning 3 percent is $240,000 annual cash income before taxes.
• note the farm program payments aren't that significant in the scheme of things.  They do make the difference between whether the enterprise shows a profit or not, but farming isn't really about making "profits", as defined by accounting professors.  Farming, at least for farmers who own the land they farm, is about cash flow, the return to land and labor.

Sidenote on TSA Issues, War, Building, Education

I've noted a couple times in the hullabaloo over the TSA scanners/pat-downs a meme contrasting American approaches to European or Israeli approaches.  I think I'd summarize things this way:

• Americans tend to rely on machines, whether in airport security, in warfare, or whatever.
• Europeans tend to rely on people.

This is probably all wrong, particularly since it doesn't account for most of the world, like Japan with its robots and China with its people. But this is a rambling set of thoughts.

But I remember a conversation with a civil engineer major at college who relayed an observation by one of his professors.  It went something like: Americans tended to design big and simple structures while Europeans tended to design more complex ones.  In America building materials were always abundant while labor was expensive, so the designers had different constraints than in Europe where labor was cheap and materials were less abundant. 

In warfare, at least beginning with the Civil War, military historians theorize that we rely on the weight of material to wear down the enemy.  We don't admit it, but valor and great generalship don't play that much of a role in our history.  For those conservatives who doubt me, read James Q Wilson's "Bureaucracy", which uses German small-unit cohesion and tactics as one example of effective bureaucracy.

In education, we are awestruck by the latest innovation in technology, whether's it's filmstrips and overhead projectors back in the day, my day, or "clickers" and Powerpoint today.  Similarly, we tend to trust the technology of testing over the power of personality. 

Just thoughts.

So my impression is that Israel, for example, depends on people interviewing people, while we trust machines.  Does it follow that we don't trust "faceless bureaucrats", while maybe other societies do?

British Exceptionalism

From Ralph Luker at Cliopatria comes a hilarious video on all things British?

Thanksgiving Wishes

Hope you all enjoy Thanksgiving.

Conference Rooms and Potted Plants

Reading the Steven Rattner book on the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies/bailouts.  As he used to be a reporter, it's a well written narrative, and I'm enjoying it.  I gather it was his first experience on the inside of a governmental bureaucracy, and he has a sharp eye for how it operates. A couple of the bureaucratic touches:

• "potted plants", which is the internal name for the people who stand behind the President as he's giving comments or making an announcement.  Rattner mourns one occasion where he and his aides didn't even make that status, being pre-empted by assorted cabinet secretaries.
• conference rooms.  Early on his group had a problem locating a conference room within the Treasury Department to hold a meeting in.  He says, or implies, there were a number of such rooms in the building, but each room was the property of a different agency within the department, so identifying a free one was difficult.  If I remember this used to be the case in USDA, but somewhere towards the end of my tenure there someone at the departmental level at least created a consolidated list for secretaries to work from, if not a single person in charge of scheduling.  Such things are an example of why the first priority of any ad hoc group leader should be to grab an experienced, top-flight secretary.

The Blinkered Conservative

Scott at Powerline has a post attacking Obama's foreign policy in regard to nuclear weapons, and other issues.

Based on my recent reading about Reagan's negotiations with the Soviets, I don't think Reagan would have much problem with Obama's view, particularly his: "...I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons..."  That's precisely what the Ronald the Great wanted.

The Filibuster 35 Years Ago

Just finished slogging through Jimmy Carter's Presidential diary book. 10 years ago I might not have used "slog", but my interest in political history is waning a bit.  Towards the end of the book, in 1979, he comments in passing that Sen. Jake Garn, Republican of Utah, threatened to filibuster any legislation to permit registering women for the draft (Carter was pushing a stand-by draft registration, which eventually passed in a male-only form).  To the best of my memory that was the only mention of a filibuster in the book; there's no entry for "filibuster" in the index. 

Carter does have a complaint about his appointments being confirmed slowly.  There was a big expansion of the federal judiciary during his term, so he had 150 new vacancies to fill.  He mentions coordinating with Senators and being frustrated by their resistance to appointments of blacks and women.