Conservation Compliance in the New Farm Bill

Chris Clayton has a discussion of farm groups, particularly the Iowa Farm Bureau, and their approach to the new farm bill.  Whether or not to make eligibility for crop insurance dependent on "conservation compliance" is a key issue, which Chris offers thoughts on.  He links to a Des Moines Register blog/report.

Apparently the Iowa FB President wanted the linkage, which presumably would help the passage of the overall bill, but his convention ultimately refused to go along.  The last paragraph of the Register post reads:

"But the delegates clearly were in a mood to revert back to the Farm Bureau’s longstanding opposition to government  involvement in day-to-day agriculture. Earlier in the morning they passed a resolution that would forbid state and federal government agencies from accepting anonymous complaints against individual farmers, and also limit the amount of government reports that could be posted on the internet.

 I'm sorry they feel that way, but as taxpayer I want any reports of possible violation of federal and state law investigated based on the merits, not tossed out because the complainant is anonymous.  That goes whether it's a complaint against a federal bureaucrat or any one else.  I also want more transparency, rather than less.

Kids and Nutritious School Lunches

Petula Dvorack has a column in today's Post on the problems of feeding kids nutritious school lunches.

Bottom line: it's very very difficult.

The Suicide Belt Sounds Like Minutemen to Me

From Freakonomics on suicide(suicide is twice as common as homicide):

The American suicide belt is comprised of about ten western states, this sort of wide longitudinal swath running from Idaho and Montana down to Arizona and New Mexico. … So, yes the inner mountain west is a place that is disproportionately populated by middle-aged and aging white men, single, unattached, often unemployed with access to guns.

Remember the Minutemen from the 1990's?  It seemed as if a high proportion felt they were mistreated by FmHA/FSA.

Closing Post Offices

By chance I grew up in a place which used to have a post office. It was a "fourth class post office".  You've never heard of such a thing?  They used to have them back in the late 1800's, but it was closed before the turn of the century. So instead we were served by a rural delivery route out of a post office 3 miles away, in the same small town which housed the central school.  "Central" because it represented the results of consolidating a bunch of one-room school houses into one school system.

My point is simply that the consolidation and centralization of facilities and infrastructure is not a new thing.  See this Rural Blog post on the current go-round.

Have Rice Growers Capitulated on Direct Payments

I noted the change of position on the part of the cotton growers here supporting a revamped crop insurance program over direct payments.

Al Cross also notes it here, calling it a seismic shift.  In the context of our 5.8 earthquake last week, I'd call it a 7.0 in the political landscape.  It shows how much impact the emphasis on cutting the 10-year deficit projections is having.  Just a year ago I'm sure I could have found many references to the idea that current programs were doing the job and the 2012 farm bill should just be a simple extension of the 2008 (which was mostly an extension of 2002, which was a modification of 1996...)

I checked the Rice Producers website, but no positions on farm bill that I saw.  I suspect they'll not fall into line.  The problem for them is: rice is irrigated, that cuts their production risk, so the major risk they have is market prices.  It will be hard to come up with crop insurance to cover that.  On the other hand, to the extent that my cynical mind suspects the cotton producers of waking up to the fact that payment limitation doesn't apply to crop insurance, maybe the rice producers will be swayed by the same consideration?

Foolish Question of the Day

Conor Friedersdorf asks:

Will listeners of Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Lara Ingraham, and the many other conservative broadcasters who talked up O'Donnell, and impugned the character of her critics, hold them accountable?

To be fair, it's a totally rhetorical question, but I enjoyed his search of the archives.

New England Floods, Deju Vu All Over Again

For those of us who have graced this earth for long enough, lots of things ring our bell making echoes of the past.  That's true for the floods in Vermont and upstate New York, reminding me (after a little googling) of the hurricanes which hit Connecticut twice in 1955, followed by a heavy storm.  From a site on the subject:

On March 19, 1956, Governor Ribicoff made the following statement before the United States Senate Appropriations Committee listing "what the 1955 floods cost Connecticut:"

• "91 persons dead and 12 others missing and presumed dead.
• 86,000 persons unemployed.
• More than 1,100 families left homeless.
• Another 2,300 families were at least temporarily without shelter.
• Nearly 20,000 families suffered flood damage.
• Sixty-seven of our 169 towns were affected by the floods.
• The damage to individual property, to business, to industry, and to State and municipal facilities has been estimated at almost half a billion dollars."³

An Ode to Washington DC and Think Tanks

Justin Wolfers bids fond farewell to the Brookings Institution and Washington, DC.  It's a reminder of some of what goes on behind the scenes of public policy. 

Do Only Old Trees Fall in a Hurricane?

I used that generalization today in an chat, but I suspect I might be wrong. When old trees fall they damage things, when young trees fall they don't.  I say that because the tree that fell closest to our house (about .25 miles away) was about 5 inches in diameter.

Determining Disability: On Silos

I found this blog post at Pro Publica to parallel concerns about using the same acreage reporting process for both FSA and crop insurance.  The logic is the same: Social Security Administration has a process for determining whether someone is disabled; Education has a provision to forgive student loans for those who are disabled; why not piggy back the student loan forgiveness on the SSA process?  Sounds good, but as usual there are good bureaucratic reasons not to, at least according to Education.

I suspect the reality might be that Congress, the public, and the bureaucrats all are envisioning an over-simplified perfect world.  If someone looked at the situation worrying about margins of error and marginal returns on investments, the end result might well have been different.  But that's not how we usually look at things, much to the dismay of economists.