The Dog Which Didn't Bark: GAO at FSA

GAO may have issued a report identifying 51 areas in which cost savings could be made, but a fast review shows they didn't ding FSA or NRCS.  The main USDA area affected was food safety.

NRCS Pushing Online Service

Via Farm Policy, here's NRCS Chief White talking about how his customers will be able to do their conservation paperwork from home by fall.  (Yes, he qualifies his hopes a bit, but it's an ambitious vision.)  This is in the Senate Ag hearing on conservation, and the audio clip doesn't include the chair's reaction to his plan.

EWG and Conservation Compliance

EWG has a paper on conservation compliance out Monday, in advance of a hearing tomorrow.

I'm no expert on the subject, particularly since my knowledge of the matching process between NRCS data and FSA data is so out of date. But the study seems professional and hits all the bases, although it obviously is pushing for changes in conservation compliance. 

Some notes:

•  the report says linking crop insurance with conservation compliance was dropped in the 96 farm bill to encourage participation in crop insurance. It argues that goal has been achieved so the requirement should be reinstated.
•  the report's interesting on the process of easing up on the initial 1986equirements.  I was sort of peripherally aware of some of the changes, but mostly of the fact NRCS did not at all like having to change from a service/educational agency to a regulatory one.

 A couple quotes I found interesting: 

there has been less focus on the FSA officials who have had the lead administrative responsibility for the law from the outset. FSA officials are responsible for making final determinations on whether producers qualify for the most important exemptions and variances, including the good faith exemption, graduated penalties and eligibility for relief because of economic or personal hardship. NRCS’s more limited role is to provide the technical information and guidance for the decisions made by FSA. According to some observers, FSA officials, who have extensive experience with enforcement of commodity program rules, have been largely unwilling to deny farm program benefits to farmers who do not actively implement their conservation plans. It is FSA that bears the greatest burden of responsibility for the law’s ineffectiveness and the apparent acrimony between FSA and NRCS officials. [page 18]

ongoing rancor between USDA’s Farm Service Agency, which has the lead responsibility for enforcement, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which provides technical assistance to farmers and conducts spot checks of compliance, has contributed to enforcement failures.  [page 22]

I wonder whether part of the resistance to the idea of combining SCS and ASCS in the early 1990's was the fear that, if you put everyone in one agency, the enforcement of conservation compliance would have been more effective.

An Honest Blogger

Which Greek of ancient times searched for an honest man? 

I forget, but I nominate Chris Bittman as an honest blogger.  After welcoming an new economics/development blog, he talks about how hard it is to last blogging substance:

My secret to longevity? Six days out of seven I cut and paste peculiar drivel I that catches my interest on the web

Gaining and Losing Resistance

John Phipps quotes a rant about farmers misusing genetic technology here. 

It caused me to wonder about this:  suppose farmers start using compound A on weeds.  Over the years the weeds develop resistance to compound A.  So our marvelous chemical industry develops compound B, which farmers start using in place of compound A. Now if I understand how it works, because weeds are now growing and reproducing  in an environment where the gene(s) providing resistance to compound A no longer provide a competitive advantage, those genes should eventually be lost from the weeds' genetic makeup. (While the weeds are busily gaining resistance to compound B.)

What I wonder, assuming I've got the biology roughly correct, is how long it takes to lose the resistance: 2 generations, 12 generations, 22 generations, 122 generations?

Simplicity and Organics

Michael Pollan's favorite organic farmer, Joel Salatin, has a new book, with an excerpt here.  Basically he's noting the misalignment between an organic operation and modern methods of marketing, particularly fast food chains and Whole Foods.  He discusses his dealings with Chipotle, where he's succeeded in selling parts of pigs (shoulders and hams) to them, but that leaves him with the problem of selling the rest of the pig.  All in all, it's a complex job of negotiation and management, a far cry from the simplicity some associate with organics.

As I've noted before, what's true for the livestock and poultry farmer like Salatin is also true for the organic field crop farmer.  To make organics work, to make the land produce as much as conventional agriculture, you need to rotate your crops.  That permits Rodale to claim their organic corn production is equal in yield to conventional, but it's also a sleight of hand because the organic corn producer has lots of alfalfa she needs to market.

As an aside, Dr. Pollan appears to be recycling his books as a good organic person should: he's got illustrated versions out now, but it's been a few years since he had a new one.

Farewell Tortilla Factory

We've been eating at Tortilla Factory in Herndon since about 1978, on a regular weekend schedule from the early 80's.  No more.  Today was our last lunch and their last day.

Everything changes and very few human organizations last and last.

It was good while it lasted.

Farmers and Computers and Public Libraries

 Both before and after I retired I've pushed the idea of farmers getting service through Internet applications.  But there are some practicalities I often miss, like the learning curve barrier.  In a different context, it shows up in the following--via Kevin Drum, from a Metafilter thread on the role of public libraries: a long comment--two excerpts:

If you can take yourself out of your first world techie social media smart-shoes for a second then imagine this: you're 53 years old, you've been in prison from 20 to 26, you didn't finish high school, and you have a grandson who you're now supporting because your daughter is in jail. You're lucky, you have a job at the local Wendy's. You have to fill out a renewal form for government assistance which has just been moved online as a cost saving measure (this isn't hypothetical, more and more municipalities are doing this now). You have a very limited idea of how to use a computer, you don't have Internet access, and your survival (and the survival of your grandson) is contingent upon this form being filled out correctly. 

....[So you go to the library to use their computers, but you don't have the experience with them and can't find the site.}

Before leaving you decide to try one last thing. You go up to the desk, and explain your situation. The tired, overworked person at the desk nods along, and says, “well, we're not supposed to do this, but...” and tells you to walk around the desk. With a few clicks on the mouse they have the site up that you spent 30 minutes trying to find. They bring up the electronic form, politely turn their head aside as you fill in your social security number, and then ask you a series of questions to satisfy the demands of the form. It comes to your email address, and you have to admit that you don't have one, so the librarian walks you through setting up a free one and gives it to you on a slip of paper. “We have free computer classes,” he says (and you're lucky, because a great deal of public libraries don't), but you look at the times and realize that between your job and taking care of your grandson you'd never be able to attend, and it'd probably be too hard anyway. You thank him, and he smiles, and you leave. Congratulations, you've staved off disaster until the next time you need to use a computer for a life-essential task.

The whole comment and thread is interesting. Unfortunately most farmers don't have access to the sort of public libraries assumed in the thread (which sounds like my local Reston library).

 

Stakeholders

Kim at Wolf Trap Opera in a blog post mentioned that "stakeholders" made her think "of someone holding a sharp stick and threatening me with it :))" "Stakeholders" were big back when we were supposedly reengineering business processes--we were supposed to identify the stakeholders and get their buy-in.  That's difficult and often didn't happen.

But how did "stake holder" evolve into its current meaning from the original meaning of a neutral party who has temporary custody of the bets/stakes of contestants?

USDA and Immigration

Usually think liberals favor easier immigration, though sometimes it's libertarians.  And usually think liberals look favorably on the food movement, which is usually anti-USDA.  But DTN reports Vilsack got favorable reaction  for his call for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.  He was keynoting the USDA ag forum, so speaking to a bunch of ag people who like easier immigration so they have someone to pick their fruits and vegetables, process their meats, and milk their cows.