Feds Save Money and "Perturb" Suppliers

That's my cynical take from this Federal Computer Week post about a change of policy at the VA.  They were using reverse auctions to buy supplies, claimed to have saved $7 million on $100 million purchases, but the authority has been suspended because of " a “ground swell” of complaints from VA suppliers and they are "causing significant perturbations in the VA supply chain."

Administering Conservation Compliance

Chris Clayton has a post on the possible linking of a conservation compliance requirement to crop insurance in the next farm bill.  There's this quote from a proponent which I don't understand:

“Despite what you may have heard, attaching compliance to the crop insurance premium support would have a pretty minimal impact back on the farm,” Scholl [head of American Farmland Trust] continued. “Farmers across the United States would still be able to buy crop insurance and get operating loans from their bank. Anyone out of compliance simply wouldn’t receive the crop insurance premium support until they come back into compliance. NRCS and FSA would still do compliance checks using the same system we have in place now, and crop insurance agents would not have an additional enforcement role.”

I've always assumed the government subsidies for crop insurance are behind the scenes, invisible to the policy holder.  If I have a policy for which the nominal premium is $1000 and the government subsidy is  $600, then the crop insurance company would bill me for $400.  Is that right?  (If so, it's another instance of "invisible government", which is the subject of a Christmas present which I've not yet read.  But that's a digression.)

If so, then if NRCS/FSA determine me to be out of compliance and notify the company, what happens? Does the company bill me for the $600, or do I just have my coverage reduced down to whatever $400 would buy me?  Seems to me whatever happens the agents are going to be somewhat involved, unless, of course, there's no consequences to the farmer being out of compliance.

  

Logic Error--the Whole and the Parts

From Ezra Klein's blog, Brad Plumer has a piece on why cities can't tackle global warming by themselves--an excerpt:

Nate Berg points to an intriguing new paper in the Journal of Urban Economics by McGill’s Adam Millard-Ball that finds two things. First, from analyzing a large sample of localities in California, Millard-Ball found cities that sign climate pledges really do take more steps to reduce their emissions. They have more green buildings. They spend more on biking and walking infrastructure. They capture more methane from landfills. But here’s the hitch: Those cities also tend to have eco-conscious residents and would’ve adopted these measures anyway, even without the plans.

I want to quibble with the last sentence.  Plumer doesn't quote any evidence for it so I'm free to argue the importance of the whole: yes, there's cases where a group action, like a city adopting an environmental plan, is mostly meaningless.  But even in those cases, there's a signaling function, an affirmation of what's important.  It's the same sort of thing as warning labels on cigarette packs and smoking bans; they say that the community disapproved of smoking which has its affect over the long haul.

NRCS Buyouts

Apparently NRCS is going to offer buyouts, focused on their administrative types in favor of centralizing some support.

One of the complications with NRCS is the presence of state and local money, given design of the legislation encouraging states to set up the soil and water conservation districts. I had thought that federal money usually funded the district conservationist, while the state/local money often funded the administrative types.  Maybe there's variation among states, maybe I was just wrong, maybe they've figured out a way to handle the funding issues so they can centralize the administrative stuff.

How Is USDA/FSA Like a College?

IMO the government webmasters could learn a bit from Timothy Burke, in this post on How to Read Departmental Webpages (and How to Make Them Readable). He compares different colleges in the accessibility of their webpages and offers suggestions to potential students on how to interpret things.  Among his lessons:

A few modest proposals:
It wouldn’t hurt anyone if college webpages had an archival or curatorial function, particularly at the departmental level. I keep a Twitter window open to the keyword Swarthmore: I get a pretty interesting picture of what’s being said about the college that way. ...
It wouldn’t hurt anyone if the descriptions of programs were punchier, more engaging, more real. Faculty love to complain about administrative-speak, committee-speak, but I’d make a guess that many of the deadliest, most abstract descriptions of departments, disciplines and programs were written by faculty.
College webpages in general should very quickly yield in their architecture to different kinds of searchers. ...
Colleges should provide a clear lexicon both of terms and concepts common to higher education as a whole and specific to their curricula and it should be one click away at all times.
...
Links that lead to dead, old, or private pages are bad and yet are also surprisingly common.

FSA Strategic Plan II

I posted an excerpt from the plan yesterday. My big problem with such strategic plans is the absence of any integration between Congress and the Executive.  In other words do the members of the House and Senate Ag committees and the members of the Ag appropriations subcommittees agree with the provisions of the plan?  I suspect no elected member has ever reviewed it.  There may be a handful of staffers who have, but I'd love to see a survey on this point.

A lesser problem is there's no recognition of the farm bill. In reality, perhaps the biggest objective for USDA, at least the farm agencies, is to implement whatever is in the farm bill.

What Does FAPRI Know We Don't

From Farmgate, summarizing a FAPRI (UofMO) 10-year projection:

Policy assumptions:
Farm Bill provisions are expected to continue, including direct payments, target prices, acreage base eligibility, and loan rates, along with renewable fuel standards, and the conservation reserve.

If I get time I'll have to look at it.

FSA Strategic Plan I

The FSA Strategic Plan 2012-16, has been released.  Beginning at  page 35 I'll quote and add emphasis:

"Objective 4.3 Strategies
• Migrate to and leverage integrated Web based solutions.
• Increase security for customers’ personal and financial information.
• Ensure the integrity of posted county price data.
• Modernize reporting capabilities to increase the usefulness and availability of data.
• Increase use of technology to support enterprise wide knowledge management.
• Streamline customer reporting and program application processes.
• Expand the customer’s ability to apply for assistance, track programs, and update farming operation information online.
• Standardize program development processes.
• Provide fully integrated geospatial solutions.
• Streamline the disaster designation process and utilize GIS to identify disaster areas quicker and more accurately.

Objective 4.4 Improve Customer Service
Pillar 1 Expand Service Delivery Capabilities
FSA will continue to offer services at its local county offices; however, program and service delivery systems must expand beyond the traditional walk-in local offices. FSA will ensure that customers are aware of e-services available and that these services are easy to use."

Under "Performance Measures for Strategic Goal 4" the unit of measure is "the number of Farm Programs eligible customers may apply for via the internet."  Currently it's 5 percent, the goal is 100 percent.


Seems to me the plan is rather wishy-washy: the idea is to expand the ability  to go online, but without worrying about whether the capability is used.  

Urban Farming--in Washington

The food movement places a lot of emphasis on urban farming, usually meaning the conversion of empty lots to community gardens, though sometimes it's rooftop gardens and occasionally vertical farming. That sequence, lots, roofs, vertical, represents my degree of sympathy with it: a good deal of sympathy for lots and very little for vertical. 

Even the conversion of empty lots is a limited expedient; such lots are mostly doomed by market forces and cultural factors. Cultural factors in that a society like the English, for example, can emphasize and preserve allotment gardening. I doubt we can create such an emphasis.  Market factors in that the same forces which eliminated the 261 farmers (owners and tenants) the 1920 census found in the District of Columbia will continue to operate.  Urban land is too valuable, so I don't expect any self-sufficient farm to be created and to last in DC.  Any farming/gardening will have to be an adjunct to some bigger institution. 

I Bet You Didn't Know This

The first use of the word "refrigerator" was in 1611.

And the technology has its roots in the 11th century with Avicemma, with Oliver Evans inventing the first one in 1805.

All this was triggered by an Ann Althouse post ,
a long quotation by Mark Twain listing the foods he wanted to eat when he returned to the U.S.  The last sentence: "Ice-water--not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator."

The listing of foods is interesting--lots of game, lots of your basic American cuisine.