NY Times and Agriculture on 12/31/2011

The Times has two stories on agriculture today: one on the growth of big organic farms outside the country, drawing down water supplies and exporting organic produce to the US; the other on the conversion of non-ag land to farmland in Iowa, and the expiration of CRP contracts.

The organic piece gets lots of exposure: comments and the top emailed piece. As the article points out, we Americans want our cheap organic tomatoes in December, and Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, and the nations in between, are willing to supply them.  The growth of exports helps those nations, which isn't something the comments note, although the article does mention it.

The Iowa piece reminds me of the 70's, when Earl Butz supposedly promoted fence row to fence row planting.  If the farmer is able to buy the land, he can tear out the fence rows, gaining some acreage and improving the efficiency with which he can farm.  Again, it's the workings of the free market in agriculture.

Petty Bureaucracy in the Private Sector: B&B Complaints

James Fallows had a bad experience with a B&B (owner forgot his reservation) and petty bureaucrats prevented him from publishing his review because he didn't actually stay at the B&B.  Read the whole thing here.  In the old days, this was a Catch-22.

Organic Versus Locavore

There's a tension between organic food and the locavores, a tension I see in this NYTimes article.  There's a scarcity of organic milk, particularly on the East Coast, partly because prices haven't risen high enough, partly because of the inflexibility of supply (takes 3 years for a dairy to convert to organic production), and partly because there's not enough organic grain grown in the East.  The latter is important because grain is important for milk production; cows produce much less milk if they're simply grazing pasture and eating hay.  So there's an imbalance in the food economy, an imbalance which the free market fills by transporting food/grain from distant places, but that's not something which locavores can be happy about.

How Society Changes: Imperceptibly

The Post has an advice columnist, Carolyn Hax, who today had this bit from a reader:

On parenting in “the good old days”:

I had two children in the 1960s, then two more in the 1990s, a generation later, and noticed in wonder that I was a different kind of father. With my first family, I was a fairly typical parent for the times. Thirty years later, I was also a pretty typical parent for the times. The change, though I was aware of it, happened unconsciously. I was not imitating or trying to be like anyone else but had adapted, it seems, to a new parenting environment, responding to new cues.

 I think the observation is true of many things: we are attuned to our environment, particularly our social environment, so whether it's fashion (observe women's fashions, tattoos, men's hairstyles), child rearing, acceptable social etiquette (jeans are okay today but smoking is not), we change.

The Victory of Government Over the Natural Life

In the old days (i.e. 18th century) cities like London were sinks, people sinks, places where people died, not places where people were born and grew.  The rural areas exported people to the city.  Such facts of history have long governed our perceptions of the relative healthiness of cities versus country.  But over time good government of the city, providing things like clean water, sanitation, reasonably clean air, good healthcare, etc. have changed the balance, leading to today's announcement that New York City, the epitome of the city for Americans, is now healthier than the rest of America.  A baby born in NYC today has a longer life expectancy than a baby born elsewhere.

Understatement of the Month

Musings from a Stonehead:

"They think keeping chickens is cheap and easy with minimal effort involved.
The reality is somewhat different.'

The First Woman (CED in OK)

The NYTimes Magazine yesterday had as its theme obituaries of people who died in 2011.  Included was a piece on people who were the "first African-American" to fill various positions.  I thought of that when today I saw this obit for Lori Ross of Ardmore, OK. It includes the paragraph:

"A 1952 graduate of Wayne High School, Wayne, Okla., she then attended East Central University, Ada, Okla. Mrs. Ross was the first woman in the State of Oklahoma to hold the position of County Executive Director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Farm Service Agency. Following her retirement after more than 30 years of employment with that agency, she worked at the Marietta Public Works Authority and also the First National Bank of Marietta. She and Marty Ross were married in Dallas, Texas, on March 13, 1971.

I understand that different states accepted women as CED's at different times.  I remember one district director in NC telling me confidentially he didn't believe in them: women shouldn't be subject to the rough language irate NC farmers could use.  One longs for such Southern chivalry today.  Or maybe he was pulling my leg?

EU Standards for Poultry, and Spanking

Via Musings from a Stonehead, I learn that the UK has new standards for poultry, bigger and better cages if I understand.  This is, I think, the wave of the future. The richer we get, the more we pamper our children, our animals, our environment.  (I realize "pamper" reveals my age.)

See Megan McArdle's piece on spanking, the decline thereof.  She argues that modern parenting is much more intensive, which to me reflects the greater availability of time and energy for child-rearing, due in part to having fewer children per household.
[Updated--put comma in title for clarity]
[Updated 2-- a link to an effort to provide homes for former battery chickens. I guess some Brits really love their fowl.]

Merry Christmas

No posting til Monday.

Retirement Parties, Past and Present

As I said I went to Star Bryant's retirement reception/party last week, which caused me to remember some retirement parties of the past.

Some 30 years ago the usual party was at a restaurant, it was in honor of a white male, the man had started his ASCS career in a county office then moved to Washington,  the party usually had been organized by the female secretaries in the division in which the man worked, it featured a lot of drinking, most of the attendees were white men, predominantly of the political party of the honoree.

Star's party reversed most of those things, but the one constant was she started her career in the county office in Johnson County, NC in 1970 or so.  As she told the story, at least as I remember her telling the story, her minister sent her down to the CED at the time (William Weller(?)) because someone good/strong was needed to integrate the office (or maybe it was the tobacco market recorder position), or maybe both.