Why We Had the Agricultural Adjustment Administration

Via Matt Yglesias, this map at Slate shows how how population changed at the county level during the Depression.  Counties in the wheat area/Great Plains suffered a loss of more than 10 percent during the 10 years, in some cases more than 25 percent. That's not just the children growing up and moving away, that's families moving (i.e., Steinbeck's Joads and the other Okies.).

The distress behind those population changes is why the New Deal passed a bunch of laws relating to agriculture and rural life.


A note: as I blogged yesterday the 1940 census records included a question on where you lived in 1935, so it should be possible to construct a map showing migration during 1930-35, and 1935-40.

Having Fun with Farmers and Ranchers

Chris Clayton enjoys poking fun at the US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance for bragging on their PR successes at the same time a producer of lean finely textured beef (the "pink slime") is going into bankruptcy.

1940 Census Records and the Return from Farming

I was lucky that ancestry.com chose NY as one of the first states for which to process 1940 census images, so I was able to see the entries for my family (not me, I just missed it so I'll have to wait another 10 years to see myself recorded).  I had a couple of surprises:

• first, the census for the first and only time asked where people had lived in 1935. Now I had assumed that my neighborhood was stable and unchanging, but it turned out about half the people on the page with my family had moved in the last 5 years.  
• second, my father listed his income as $0.  (Yes, the census bureau was asking about family income back then--our forebears weren't as touchy about releasing personal data as we seem to be today.  Or maybe they had more respect for authority and the establishment.)  Dad was one of the early farmers who participated in a cost-accounting study from Cornell extension.  Not that he was a great record keeper; I'm sure I inherited my disorderly gene from him.  But yearly I think it was he would put on a push to update his cost accounts on the forms Cornell provided him.  I don't remember whether the Extension professor picked them up in person, or dad mailed them off. So I suspect dad's report of $0 was based on his cost accounts, which would have subtracted from his gross income the interest earned on the capital invested.   That used to be a sore point with my mother, who got very fierce about underpaid farmers, often claiming farmers would be better off selling out and investing the returns for a safe return.  The bottom line was the family had a small positive cash flow, but we weren't doing well.

Maple Syrup and Commercial Production

We had a big maple shading our yard, which once I tapped and made a little bit of maple syrup from the sap.  Only once, because I didn't and don't have the patience needed to boil down the sap.  But my memories of that long-ago episode meant  I found this post at Casaubon's Book on the plight of New York syrup makers interesting.  The unusually warm weather meant production is way down. And most interesting was the idea of a vacuum system, which commercial producers now use to extract sap.  $10,000 for such a system won't sound like much to commercial grain producers in the Midwest, but it's a step up for people who didn't use to need such capital.

Kevin Drum Loves Factory Farming

That's a tongue-in-cheek part of his reaction to a report on what Americans spend their money on compared to other countries. Food is low on our list.

[Updated to correct grammar]

Pink Slime Meets Green Slime

I've said a couple times that calling the thing "pink slime" is the most effective framing of an issue since the Republicans came up with the "death tax".  I'm amused by this Grist piece, which suggests that "pink slime" may contribute to the good taste of hamburgers and recounts the efforts of an organic beef producer to come up with an organic equivalent, which he calls "green slime".   His efforts, though, cause me to rethink my position: I now think "pink slime" is a much more effective framing than is the death tax.

Successful Illinois Grain Farms

Illinois extension has studied factors leading to success in Illinois grain farms.  Here's the bottomline:

In summary, this series on farm performance has shown that grain farms which achieve higher yields and receive higher prices earn greater returns consistently over time and within any given crop year when examining the 2005 to 2009 period. On the cost side, farms earning higher returns also have lower costs of production, and there is a wider gap in power costs between the top and bottom performance groups compared to direct input costs. In terms of farm size and tenure position, larger operations with more total acres and fewer acres rented under fixed cash rent agreements are characteristics of the higher return groups.[my emphasis]

 It goes on to say that most of the success is the ability to achieve higher yields; good marketing doesn't account for much of the differences among farms. Once again, IMHO farmers are price takers, not price makers.

George Will's Baseball Quiz

George has a quiz on baseball history here.  I got a couple right: Whitey Ford and Stan Musial.  I guess that shows my age. 

Haunted by Vietnam? Try Algeria

When I Google "haunted by Vietnam" I get 87,000 hits. Currently it seems that Obama and the military are the ones haunted. I think though that we're mostly over the Vietnam war, except perhaps as it gets wrapped up with the cultural war and what we call the "Sixties". If I'm right maybe the U.S. is a bit more mature than the French, or maybe the Algerian war was much more traumatic for the French than Vietnam was for us.

That's the conclusion I draw from reading Dirk Beauregarde's post, keyed to the 50th anniversary of the end of the Algerian war, including interviews with relatives of Algerian soldiers serving with the French army.  Lots of trauma there, perhaps somewhat parallel to the Loyalists after the American Revolution.

A sidenote: JFK first made his national mark as a liberal and policy  thinker (as opposed to a politico who tried to be the VP candidate in 1956) by a speech on Algeria attacking French colonialism.

Another sidenote: The Battle of Algiers is highly regarded.

Firing People

Via Tyler Cowen, a Bryan Caplan post about why they haven't been fired, the "they" being employees of dubious worth (I clicked there expecting something about firing executives of financial companies but it's just employees who aren't pulling their weight). 

The bottom line to me: bosses in the private world have the same sort of problems in firing as those in the public world.