Extension Falls for Fake Science

IMO, biodynamics is fake science, so I'm distressed the Extension website would host this post.  From the Demeter website:

The use of the preparations is a requirement of the Farm Standard. There are nine in all, made from herbs, mineral substances and animal manures, that are utilized in field sprays and compost inoculants applied in minute doses, much like homeopathic remedies are for humans.[emphasis added] Timely applications revitalize the soil and stimulate root growth, enhance the development of microorganisms and humus formation, and aid in photosynthetic activity.

 What are the preparations?  According to wikipedia:

• 502: Yarrow blossoms (Achillea millefolium) are stuffed into urinary bladders from Red Deer (Cervus elaphus), placed in the sun during summer, buried in earth during winter and retrieved in the spring.
• 503: Chamomile blossoms (Matricaria recutita) are stuffed into small intestines from cattle buried in humus-rich earth in the autumn and retrieved in the spring.
• 504: Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) plants in full bloom are stuffed together underground surrounded on all sides by peat for a year.
• 505: Oak bark (Quercus robur) is chopped in small pieces, placed inside the skull of a domesticated animal, surrounded by peat and buried in earth in a place where lots of rain water runs past.
• 506: Dandelion flowers (Taraxacum officinale) is stuffed into the peritoneum of cattle and buried in earth during winter and retrieved in the spring.
• 507: Valerian flowers (Valeriana officinalis) are extracted into water.
• 508: Horsetail (Equisetum)

 I can grasp some logic in saying the farm should be self-sustaining; don't import anything. It's locavore ag carried to the nth degree.  But logically that means don't export anything, all excretion must occur on the farm.  As I say: stuff and nonsense.

End Waste, Fraud, and Abuse and Sell Surplus Property?

CBO says trying to sell more Federal surplus property won't raise money, it will cost money. That won't kill the myth though.  Selling property will remain a favorite of the demagogues (whether Obama or whoever), ranking just after the perennial "cut government waste....".

Cutting Direct Payments

It's always interesting to a born bureaucrat to see how lawyers will implement policy proposals.  We're getting an indication of how reductions in direct payments might be made from today's Farm Policy: changing the definition of "payment acres" for 2011.  Specifically:

(3) by adding at the end the following: ‘‘(C) in the case of direct payments for the 2012 crop year, 59 percent of the base acres for the covered commodity on a farm on which direct payments are made.’’.

My reaction: should be easy to implement, which is the prime consideration for a bureaucrat.

Warning: Posts Updates

I'm still using the new Blogger editor and still having problems--either I miss adding labels to the post or I miss titling the post.  So don't be surprised if the RSS feed shows these problems--I usually update the posts quickly after I discover the problem.

End of Farm Programs, End of Workload

Farm Policy quotes extensively from a Wall Street Journal piece on farm programs (behind pay wall), including this bit of interest:

The Journal article also noted that, “Meanwhile, workers in the USDA’s county offices, seeing the handwriting on the wall, are campaigning for new things to do, now that there aren’t any price-support payments to dispense. One idea is to give them responsibility for federally subsidized crop insurance, currently handled by private companies. Because crop values are higher, the amount the federal government spends annually on crop insurance is forecast to climb above $7 billion by 2013, up 60% from last year.”

 NASCOE is getting ready for its convention, with the President raising issues, including whether to try to protect as many jobs as possible, given the likelihood of a 10 percent cut in staffing and plans to close more offices.

A Poor Commentary on American Society

The lead sentence of an MSNBC piece of a few days ago reads:

"Black men are half as likely to die at any given time if they're in prison than if they aren't, suggests a new study of North Carolina inmates."

Two more paragraphs:

"White prisoners died of cardiovascular diseases as often as expected and died of cancer slightly more often than non-prisoners.
Black inmates, by contrast, were between 30 and 40 percent less likely to die of those causes than those who weren't incarcerated. They were also less likely to die of diabetes, alcohol- and drug-related causes, airway diseases, accidents, suicide and murder than black men not in prison."

IRS Is the National Bureaucracy

Via Mankiw, this article is a very detailed discussion of  tax expenditures. Recommended if you're interested.  What strikes me is one of my pet ideas: our weak government.  Basically the IRS is the only national bureaucracy, the one and only instrument of government which is able to touch (ouch) the vast majority of people in the country.  So if we want to subsidize children we give a child tax credit, if we want to help the working poor we give the earned income tax credit, if we want to encourage home-ownership we permit deduction of mortgage interest, if we want people to have health insurance, we don't tax employer provided health insurance, and so on.

Our approach hides the size and cost of the government, as the article describes.  It also results in a less efficient IRS, because it has to do a lot more things, rather than focus on the task of collecting taxes and finding tax cheats. Of course that fits with the reasons why we Americans like a weak national government: we don't like a bureaucracy, at least not an obvious one, and we think freedom is having invisible constraints.

Fairfax County: The Leading Dairy County

Yes, by some measurements Fairfax county is the country's richest county, but its true measure of fame came 110 years ago when it was the leading dairy county in Virginia, apparently a position it maintained until the 1950's.  Herndon Patch has a post on this, and the famed Sadie, who apparently average 11-12,000 pounds of milk a year as the best known Holstein in the world.  That's compared to the average cow in VA which produced 2,500 pounds.  If I remember, our Holsteins in the 1950's were producing something comparable to Sadie, but they had the advantage of another 30 or so years of breeding and advancement in nutrition.

ACRSI Comments

See this USDA blog post for an invitation to comment on the proposed acreage and crop reporting system initiative, either at USDA or through comments on the Federal Register publication.

American Exceptionalism: the Good and the Bad

Robin Hanson says after citing research showing that people are more willing to do bad if they've recently done good:

Citizens of the United States are especially proud of a history of (supposedly) doing good. The US sees itself as having saved the world from Nazism and Communism, of creating and sustaining modern medicine, of educating the world via the best universities, of being the main innovators in computer tech, of upholding the highest standards of civil and gender rights, of being unusually devoted to religion, etc.
All this self-respect, deserved or not, probably makes US citizens more willing to do bad, both individually and collectively. Dear US citizens: please ask yourself how sure you can be that your actions on the world stage are actually for good.