Draft Proposal Farm Bill

Via Des Moines Register here's the current draft proposal.

Blue State, Not So Blue Air

Treehugger has a list of the 20 dirtiest cities (dirtiest air, that is). When you look at it, note that seven of the worst 10 cities are in California.  Except for Houston, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City, the other cities are mostly in blue states.  This might be a clue for the reason why conservatives and liberals talk past each other on environmental issues: they look out the window and they see a different reality.

The Poor Goats

Buried in this Politico piece on the passage of the ag (plus others) appropriations bill is a sentence: "Mohair subsidies would be ended."  First VP Gore goes after them in the 1990's, and now the program is ended again.  I wonder if there's any record for the number of times a program has been ended, and then revived?

Powerpoint: Gee We Knew That in 1991

Megan McArdle rants about the misuse of Powerpoint, including reading the slides and having the font too small to read.  My reaction: My boss, SP, and employees knew better than that 20 years ago.

No Super Committee Resolution and the Farm Bill

If the super committee fails to reach agreement, that kills the 2012 farm bill for this year.  Presumably the Ag committees and the ag lobbies will use the holidays to consider what they put together in a rush, and early next year we'll start to see legislation drafted.  In other words, we'll be back to the regular order of things.  The 64 dollar question is what sort of funding baseline they'll work with. Will they have the dollars they propose to the super committee, more or less?

The other question of importance is what will the farm economy be doing next spring and summer?  Recently corn and wheat prices have slid (see this Des Moines Register piece for corn.) Problem is that Ukraine and other grain producers have had good years.  (Back in the day, Ukraine used to be the breadbasket of Europe.  Just maybe modern farming methods and rational organization has finally arrived there so they can resume their place?)

I don't know enough to guess what will happen if prices have retreated significantly, but I would assume that it would change the bargaining and perhaps the framework of the programs in the farm bill.

As I've written, I now realize there's a window of opportunity for FSA/RMA to install MIDAS and ACRSI before being hit with the new farm bill.  But if the super committee fails, there may be an extended period of uncertainty over the future 2013 and on, meaning the bureaucrats have a compressed lead-time to get things in place. 

So if I'm an FSA bureaucrat do I pray for the success of the super committee, knowing it might well mean program changes which eviscerate much of the agency, or do I pray for failure, guessing it might make next fall torture?

Politico on the Farm Bill

As a change of pace, I take advantage of Politico's unusual attention to farm bill issues to link to their report

Pareto and Sports: the 80/20 Thing

Ever since I learned it, I've loved the Pareto principle, the 80/20 thing.  I particularly applied it to software, most notably back in the day when we were trying to automate deficiency payments. I think I can claim credit, or blame, for splitting payments into two categories: special and regular.  The regular ones we'd try to run as a batch, the special we'd struggle with as best we could.

Now people have discovered the 80/20 rule works for sports, specifically in things like tennis the best 20 percent of the players win 80 percent of the prizes.  See this Technology Review piece

Good News for Obama

Stolen from Joshua Tucker at Monkey Cage, although reworded: While his young voters from 2008 may lose some enthusiasm as 2012 approaches, partly because they've graduated into a terrible job market, McCain's old voters from 2008 will also be losing enthusiasm for the Republican candidate, partly because they're dying off.

Bureaucrat Scores

Lifted from a comment on Ta-Nahesi Coates blog

I would like to take this opportunity to deeply thank the people on the dispute line for the Department of Labor in Maryland. There was a problem with my severance pay affecting when my unemployment started, they sent me a letter saying they'd call at 1PM. They called me exactly at 1, addressed the issue in about 30 seconds, answered a bunch of questions I had and caught and fixed a mistake on my e-file that I didn't even knew I made. All in about 5 minutes. Easily the greatest customer/client service I've ever received, public or private, and it was from a state bureaucrat at a call center.

Sex Gives Farmers Troubles

That's my takeaway from a Stu Ellis piece on waterhemp, a weed which is very difficult for farmers to control.  The reason, although I'm reading between the lines and making assumptions, is sex:

Since the waterhemp family has both male and female plants whose genes mix annually, the genetic diversity increases every year and an increasing number of plants have become resistant to a wider variety of herbicides. 

 If I recall my biology, that's the purpose of having sex, to increase diversity and therefore increase adaptability to the environment.  I'm glad to know some of my knowledge isn't obsolete.