NASCOE Versus Crop Insurance III

For background, see prior posts here and  here

What I would really like to see, though it will never happen, is a controlled test of FSA servicing crop insurance versus the companies servicing crop insurance.  Choose 10 counties and have half the current insureds serviced by FSA and half by the companies. Run the test for 3 years and compare results.

Why won't it happen?  Disregarding the political realities, the practical consideration is: to service crop insurance you need to develop software. To do the job right, you need the software to be integrated with FSA's existing or to-be systems.  That takes time and money, which you can't justify for a limited test.  (Though it's what we did with CAT insurance over a couple years.  Unfortunately FSA management in DC spun its wheels for some months so the first year was pretty grim.  The second year was significantly better.  And then the big shots proclaimed that CAT was available through insurance agents through the whole country.)

Of course, if the result of the test were to show a big advantage for FSA (which most people who worked for FSA would like to believe) and you extrapolate that over the country and over 40 years, then it's worthwhile to do the test.  But that's not how we do things in this country. 

Closing FSA Offices

Vilsack's going ahead with plans to close 131 FSA offices. 

I see the Broome County, NY NRCS office is going to be closed as well.

Crop Insurance Going On-Line?

I posted yesterday about the head of NRCS boasting about plans to put conservation work online for his customers.

I wonder, are the private crop insurance companies putting their work online? At the moment I'm too lazy to try to find out, but surely one or more of the companies is doing that?

Government Geography and Palin

The Post had a piece reporting on a Gallup survey showing the location of government employees (all levels).  As you'd expect, DC, MD, VA are at the top.  What's surprising is, they aren't at the very top; Alaska and Hawaii are.  Yes, that's right. Sarah Palin was once the governor of the state with the most government employees (percentage of total).

And states like SC, WY, NM, WV, and MS rounded out the top ten.  What it is, is a reminder of how big DOD is and the difference it makes in some states.

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.