Americans Love Red Tape

Not in the abstract, but in specific areas, as Suzy Khim reports at Ezra Klein.

The Hopes of Progress and Wheat

Via Marginal Revolution, I read an article from 1900 on how the world might end.  One of the possibilities was starvation:

"Should all the wheat-growing countries add to their area to the utmost capacity, on the most careful calculation the yield would give us only an addition of some 100,000,000 acres, supplying at the average world-yield of 12.7 bushels to the acre, 1,270,000,000 bushels. Adding 2,324,000,000 to 1,270,000,000 we get 3,594,000,000 bushels, or just enough to supply the increase of population among bread-eaters till the year 1931.

But:

"Since by the year 1931 the area of cultivation can be no further extended, the farmer must endeavour to raise the average yield per acre. If atmospheric nitrogen could only be made generally available as manure in accordance with Nikola Tesla's great scheme, then the ground might be made to bear twice as large crops as it does at present."

 The hopes for progress were rather limited: doubling the yield.

The Glories of Spring

Just pausing to note the warm spring weather, the trees are starting to bloom (red maple and now I think the pears?), the crocus and daffodils are blooming (why can't the breeders come up with a daffodil which can bloom when crowded?), the birds are around.

I wonder if those raised in suburbs and cities are as conscious of the seasons as on the farm.  I suspect not, poor souls.

Big Dairy

One fact I didn't note when looking at this report: more than 50 percent of total US production comes from dairies with more than 1,000 cows.

That's an amazing number--when I was growing up 50 cows seemed big, about all one person could handle with a bit of hired labor.  While productivity has grown, I'm sure these dairies depend on hired hands, these days probably a lot of immigrants.

Also see the ERS page.

The Perils of Blogging

From Chris Blattman, who's on vacation in Vietnam:

I only realized this by accident, when I peeked into my email Inbox for one measly second (I am still on vacation, dammit) and notice a gazillion comments and pingbacks on a post I wrote three years ago about Invisible Children. In the past three days, that post received roughly as much traffic as the entire blog in 2012.

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."