The Green Jacket Wearer Says: Open the Doors

Via John Sides at the Monkey Cage, from a post reporting on interviews/surveys of golfers:

Does it bother you that the club's membership excludes women?
The players say... No: 90%
"Nothing about the club's policies bothers me."
"It's their club. They can do as they like."
"You're asking the wrong people this question."
Yes: 10%
"Yeah, I care, and you can quote me on it." —Bubba Watson

In Defense of Conferences

The lead sentence of a Matt Yglesias post:

"I was at a Kaufmann Foundation conference of economics writers late last week, and as usual at a good event like this I feel I learned a ton of stuff in informal conversations with people there and sharpened my own thinking on tons of points." [my emphasis]

 I think that's true and it's one reason why teleconferencing and similar alternatives to in-person meetings can only go so far. When dealing with people in the flesh, particularly people you've never met or don't usually deal with, you learn a lot.  That logic is why, according to Walter Isaacson's bio, Steve Jobs was careful to design Apple's building to foster meetings.  And a similar process occurred in Bell Labs.

I Don't Understand: FSA Versus NRCS

I was solemnly assured by a number of people (all ASCS/FSA employees) that the SCS/NRCS conservationists spent all their time riding around in their pickup trucks and never could be found in the office.   And ASCS employees never lie.  So what's with this Federal Computer Week article on the NRCS "streamlining plan" which reports:

Currently, the USDA field conservationists report spending as little as 20 to 40 percent of their time in the field working with customers

The expected outcome of the initiative is for field staff to be able to spend up to 75 percent of their time in the field with customers, the plan said.

The initiative will free up the equivalent of an additional 1,200 to 1,500 field technical staff that will be redirected back into customer contact, the USDA said in its plan.

  Here's the plan which is only 5 months old (only the latest news on this blog). It's actually part of the USDA plan.  Funny, though, it sounds basically like the vision which Kevin Wickey and other NRCS people were trying to implement back in the Glickman days.  Which as I understood it, was putting everything on a laptop which a conservationist would need in the field.

Urban Greenhouses

The NYTimes reports on plans for 100,000 square foot greenhouse on the roof of a former Navy warehouse in Brooklyn.  Here the plan is for hydroponics.  Unlike vertical farming, these things make some sense to me.  I say "some" because I've got reservations: in this case I'd assume the economics are based on both a successful hydroponic farm and use of the warehouse.  Presumably if one or the other runs into trouble, the whole enterprise becomes a bit dubious. And a dual-function site requires two sets of expertise so perhaps two sets of  management and labor, which means it's more complicated than just a site dedicated to one function. But if the people can make it work, it's better use of the area and the resources, as well as reducing the need for transportation of the crops.

See this treehugger piece on a similar project

Your USDA at Work, Promoting Aussie Happiness

Beer paddles in Australia, via James Fallows and, according to him, sponsored by the USDA:

Hot News--No Marketing Quota

Ironically, given the prominence of Wickard v. Filburn  in the arguments over the constitutionality of the PPACA (healthcare), USDA just announced there will be no marketing quotas for 2013 crop wheat.  (Because the 2008 farm bill only covered through 2012, the 1938 AAA comes back into effect for 2013 wheat.  If the Secretary thought quotas were needed to balance production and demand, he would have announced they were in effect and called for a referendum of wheat producers to vote on whether the quotas would be implemented.  If the producers approved quotas, then we would be back in the situation which created Wickard v Filburn.

Pink Slime Defended

Via Tyler Cowen, here's a defense of "pink slime", also quoting a NYTimes blogger. The short version is that it's been used in ground beef since beef prices soared in the '70's (our going off gold, jump in grain prices as USSR started buying, etc.), has been safe since Jack in the Box went out of business in the 90's, and makes hamburger lower in fat..

The defense makes sense, but it assumes consumers really want to understand how food gets on their table. In my cynical view today, they don't, because if they did they'd face much higher food bills.. The food movement will be able to whack a few moles, artisanal food producers will be able to find some niches, but the vast majority of the food that goes on our tables will be produced by "industrial agriculture". 

GPRA: Measuring Performance

Some 20 or so years after the GPRA was passed, we'll still trying to figure out how to measure performance.  The latest buzzword is "cascading".

More Young People Running Small Farms?

One of the fault lines in the green/food movement is shown here.  Ideally they'd like to see more young farmers and small farmers.  They'd also like conservation. But, as quoted from Farm Policy:

“He [Sen. Baucus MT] says there needs to be a balance in the conservation reserve program lands saying, ‘CRP [Conservation Reserve Program] tends to have an adverse effect on some of the smaller towns, on implement dealers for example. Sometimes farmers just go south and have land in CRP and take the income. We’re actually starting to reduce CRP in a way to help younger people get in to agriculture.’”

That's been there since the beginning, or at least the 1930's.  If you take land out of agricultural production, whether for conservation purposes because it's below-average land and subject to erosion, etc., or because you want to reduce production in order to increase prices, you can endanger the people who depend on farmers to make a living and by increasing the value of the remaining farm land you make it harder for people to begin farming.

The old saw goes: there's no such thing as a free lunch, meaning there's always tradeoffs.

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.