More on Big Dairy

It seems the NYTimes Magazine has a piece tomorrow on 3 generations of a dairy farm,, going from hand milking to 135 cows. The daughter, the fourth generation, developed a summer camp on the farm to put herself through Cornell.

Pearl Harbor and FDR

One oddity, historical quirk, something related to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: the iconic picture is the sinking of the battleship Arizona.  Turns out as described in this post on the National Archives blog FDR officiated at the laying of the keel of the ship.

Our Well Housed DOD

There was a piece in today's Post with DOD officials asking for a new set of BRAC's (base closing commissions).  One factoid: DOD has 300,000 buildings.  Since DOD can't have more than 3 million employees and contractors, I can only conclude DOD is very well housed (or perhaps there was an error in the piece).

Change in Number of Dairy Farms

In the last 10 years, how has the number of dairy farms changed?

Dropped by one-third according to this comment reported by Farm Policy from Sen. Brown (OH):

While I support programs like Milk Income Loss Contract for the financial relief it provides to farmers in bad times, since its creation in the 2002 Farm Bill more than a third of America’s dairy farmers have gone out of business. 

 [Updated: Only a tenth of the number in 1971]

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.