On Adapting to the Weather on the Farm

We didn't grow corn in my time on the farm, which was long ago anyway, so his content is mostly a mystery to me, but John Phipps has an interesting post outlining 11 steps he and his son are taking to adapt their operation to changes in weather/climate.  I'm not sure they're not preparing to fight the last war; one of the things I think we know is that weather in the future will be as variable as in the past.  To me that means that adjusting farming operations is likely to pay off over the long haul, but not necessarily the short.   (As a side note, I saw somewhere that one place we got additional acreage from is by doublecropping; apparently in southern Illinois and other places it's now possible to follow wheat with short season corn.)

The 11 steps demonstrate clearly how much knowledge the modern farmer needs.  It's just a continuation of a long long trend, a trend which puts the small farmer and the older farmer at a competitive disadvantage.

The Learning Occupations: Farming

Jennifer Warthan at The Cotton Wife has a too-cute series of photos showing her son <5? imitating his father as he works on farm machinery. 

There are some occupations, farming and storekeeping for two, where the offspring can learn at the knees of their parents.  There must be some life lessons in such learning, I'm not sure what, but there must be.  Of course in the days of the one earner family and the stay at home homemaker, girls learned at the knees of their mothers, but we don't, or I don't at least, grow as sentimental over those life lessons.

On Over Estimating Gardening Interest

Here's an honest gardener at Treehugger: she realizes her eyes were bigger than her willpower, particularly in North Carolina heat.  One of the weaknesses of the locavore movement is this fact; short term enthusiasms erode under the day to day realities of work, drought, insects, flood, mistakes and entropy.

Excessive Incentives

Greg Mankiw links to a video by Jeff Miron, an economics professor at Harvard on 3 myths of capitalism.  His third myth is that capitalism caused the Great Recession: no, no, no--it wasn't capitalists, it was the excessive incentives from government policy. 

Now it seems to me that one argument for the Bush tax cuts, particularly on those with higher incomes, was to provide incentives to entrepreneurs.  So the lesson I take away from Prof. Miron is that we ought to allow them to expire immediately

The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight

The idea of this very long post is that we know we ourselves are full of mysteries, while we know we pretty well understand other people.  Rings true to me.  Apparently the blogger has a book coming out and is using the blog  to stir interest.  He succeeded with me.  An excerpt:

In a political debate you feel like the other side just doesn’t get your point of view, and if they could only see things with your clarity, they would understand and fall naturally in line with what you believe. They must not understand, because if they did they wouldn’t think the things they think. By contrast, you believe you totally get their point of view and you reject it. You see it in all its detail and understand it for what it is – stupid. You don’t need to hear them elaborate. So, each side believes they understand the other side better than the other side understands both their opponents and themselves.

The Bubble in Farmland Prices

Farmgate has an index of Illinois farmland prices here.  Here's the recent figures:

2001 123
2002 126
2003 131
2004 138
2005 173
2006 193
2007 216
2008 245
2009 244
2010 264
2011 307

As a comparison, my neighbors house sold for about $100K in 2000 and about $360K in 2006.  Bottom line: see the title of this post.

The Rockwells, Art, and Race

This Politico story covers a Norman Rockwell painting just hung in the White House. Obama's too young to remember it, when it first appeared as a magazine cover, so is most of the country.

My family subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post during the 40's and 50's.  I looked forward to the arrival of each issue, because I was ravenous for reading material (no TV in those days). A Rockwell cover was usually notable, something even my parents would express interest in and pleasure in. As I remember, he was the only painter/illustrator of whom that could be said.  The closest parallel today I can think of is the occasional New Yorker cover, but none of the artists of those covers stand out in my mind. It was a sad day when he left the SEP.

The Problem We All Live With was unusual for Rockwell; he didn't usually comment on social issues (except for his version of FDR's Four Freedoms, but that was before my time).  It was also painted for Look, appearing in January 1964.  I was in grad school then, so I would have seen it on the newsstand. I remember, I think, believing that it was a sign of "middle America" moving to the left.  JFK had been dead a month and a half and LBJ was pushing the Civil Rights Act to honor his memory.  (LBJ would go to hell to find some lever to move Congress--as I say, Obama was too young to take lessons.)

When I was young, I used to confuse the Rockwells, because there were two of them: Norman and George Lincoln (no relation), and in those days there was no Wikipedia to refresh your memory as to who was whom. So it took a while for me to recognize that there were two separate people, not one guy who painted well but had evil political opinions. (I've never been good with names.)  George Lincoln Rockwell was the founder of the American Nazi Party, which was a bit more anti-Semitic than anti-black, mainly because Rockwell formed his opinions before the rise of the civil rights movement.  But he did his best to make up for it by changing the "American Nazi Party" to the "National Socialist White Person's Party."

So the two Rockwell's model the shift in American public opinion during the early '60's: one moving left, the other far right.

Earthquake in Reston

We just had an earthquake, first time I've been through one.  Strong enough to knock a few books off a bookshelf  (they were piled high).  My guess is it lasted 20 seconds or so--we'll see what USGS says since they're based in Reston.
[Update: 5.9 apparently and the first of that magnitude in Virginia for a while.  One of our cats slunk down to the basement, very upset, while the other on our bed opened an eye and went back to sleep. Actually, I don't know that for sure, but she was still in her position about 5 minutes after the earthquake. Different strokes for different folks and different cats.]

Agricultural Robots: Progress Report

The Economist has an interesting piece on the development of agricultural robots: machines intelligent enough and adept enough to handle growing and harvesting fruit (mostly), sometimes in greenhouses, sometimes not. (I owe a hat tip to someone, but I had a senior moment.)   Machines can take over some functions, replacing (immigrant) labor and saving money.  The problem is they represent an added capital cost, so they imply bigger operations, more "industrial" farms. One truth the foodies often don't recognize is that fruits and vegetables already represent the most concentrated, most industrial branch of agriculture.  Of course, the promise of cheaper fruits and vegetables is something the food movement can't oppose, is it?

Fortune-seeking? Marry a Farmer's Widow

Way back in the day, a quarter section of land (160 acres) in the Midwest was a good farm.  So the farmers grew old and then died, leaving their widows to rent out the land and move to town.   Speculation is that cash rents for good farmland in 2012 might be in the range of $350 to $400 an acre (lost the link--might be farmgate).  I may be old but I can still multiply $400 x 150 (cheating a bit) to get $60,000  annual cash income for my hypothetical widow.

Via John Phipps, Agweb reports the sale of a quarter section in IA for $14,350. I can't multiply that in my head but I guesstimate that's about $20 million. (The same land went in 1956 for about $538 an acre.)

Bottom line: there's some rich widow ladies out there.  And the estate tax is going to become a hot issue.