USDA Should Go on Telework?

USDA offices were closed because of a small fire and the resulting cutoff of power, says this Government Executive piece.  I wonder what sort of fallback plans they had in place?  Any?  Or just take leave?

War Averted?

Apparently so, according to this post. 
See after the jump.

Implementing Payment Limitation on Crop Insurance

I blogged about the GAO report on the impact of instituting a payment limitation on crop insurance. If adopted, FSA should send flowers to Sen. Coburn because I can't see any way for RMA/crop insurance companies to implement the limitation without FSA.

I'm not sure how it would work in practice--FSA has some experience with this sort of thing--I'm thinking of trying to apply payment eligibility and limitation rules on members of cotton and rice co-ops.  I suspect there'd be the same sort of problems with crop insurance.

Guerrilla Gardening and Life

The Post has an article on the new popularity of "guerrilla gardening", including throwing bombs:

They rush toward a drab vacant lot in Shaw. Some climb up onto the back of a truck to get better aim at their target. But these bombers aren’t likely to appear on any terrorist list or even get arrested. They’re throwing “seed bombs,” golf-ball-size lumps of mud packed with wildflower seeds, clay and a little bit of compost and water, which they just learned to make at a free seed-bombing workshop for Washington’s guerrilla gardeners.

 It goes on:

The bombs will — in theory — bloom into bachelor’s buttons and baby’s breath, forget-me-nots and marigolds when the truffle-size balls hit, then expand. It also helps if there’s a healthy spring rain, said Scott Aker, head of horticulture for the U.S. National Arboretum. If the bombs are launched into a sunny space where there’s not too much other vegetation present, then he gives the seeds a 70 percent chance of blooming. “But either way, it sounds like great fun,” Aker says. “On your commute, you can toss one out the window.”

I hate to be a party-pooper (I lie, actually; I love to poop on other people's ideas) but Mr. Aker has carefully chosen his qualifiers.  The likelihood of finding a bare sunny spot which gets rain is pretty damn small due a to 5-letter word: weeds. Weeds survive by colonizing any such spots.  And usually flowers which humans have cultivated over the centuries don't have the oomph to out-compete the weeds, as real gardeners know to their cost (of sweat and toil). 

But it's a fun idea, and in some ways a metaphor for life: we go through life tossing seed bombs, most of which fail to thrive but occasionally one will produce a short-lived bloom.

McWilliams on Animals and Local Food

James McWilliams has an op-ed in the Times on the myth of sustainable meat.

"But rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows’ grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. This common practice is an economic necessity. Still, if a farmer isn’t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling."

 He's against locavores, but also against meat.

You're Getting Old When...

The star of  a movie  is playing a role in which she fears she has Alzheimer's and you remember when her mother left her husband to begin the affair with her father which resulted in her birth.

It was a great scandal then, wouldn't be one now.

Payment Limitation on Crop Insurance?

NY Times reports Sen. Coburn asked GAO to study the possible impact of payment limitations on crop insurance.  The report was released today and is here.http://gao.gov/products/GAO-12-256.  The first two paragraphs from the summary:

If a limit of $40,000 had been applied to individual farmers’ crop insurance premium subsidies, as it is for other farm programs, the federal government would have saved up to $1 billion in crop insurance program costs in 2011, according to GAO’s analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data. GAO selected $40,000 as an example of a potential subsidy limit because it is the limit for direct payments, which provide fixed annual payments to farmers based on a farm’s crop production history. Had such a limit been applied in 2011, it would have affected up to 3.9 percent of all participating farmers, who accounted for about one-third of all premium subsidies and were primarily associated with large farms. For example, one of these farmers insured crops in eight counties and received about $1.3 million in premium subsidies. Had premium subsidies been reduced by 10 percentage points for all farmers participating in the program, as recent studies have proposed, the federal government would have saved about $1.2 billion in 2011. A decision to limit or reduce premium subsidies raises other considerations, such as the potential effect on the financial condition of large farms and on program participation.

Since 2001, USDA has used data mining tools to prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse by either farmers or insurance agents and adjusters but has not maximized the use of these tools to realize potential additional savings. This is largely because of competing compliance review priorities, according to GAO’s analysis. USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA), which is responsible for overseeing the integrity of the crop insurance program, has used data mining to identify farmers who received claim payments that are higher or more frequent than others in the same area. USDA informs these farmers that at least one of their fields will be inspected during the coming growing season. RMA officials told GAO that this action has substantially reduced total claims. The value of identifying these farmers may be reduced, however, by the fact that USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA)—which conducts field inspections for RMA—does not complete all such inspections, and neither FSA nor RMA has a process to ensure that the results of all inspections are accurately reported. For example, RMA did not obtain field inspection results for about 20 percent and 28 percent of these farmers, respectively, in 2009 and 2010. As a result, not all of the farmers RMA identified were subject to a review, increasing the likelihood that fraud, waste, or abuse occurred without detection. Field inspections were not completed, in part because FSA state offices are not required to monitor the completion of such inspections. In addition, RMA generally does not provide insurance companies with FSA inspection results when crops are found to be in good condition, although USDA’s Inspector General has reported this information may be important for followup. Past cases have revealed that some farmers may harvest a high-yielding crop, hide its sale, and report a loss to receive an insurance payment. Furthermore, RMA has not directed insurance companies to review the results of all completed FSA field inspections before paying claims that are filed after inspections show a crop is in good condition. As a result, insurance companies may not have information that could help them identify claims that should be denied.

Hacked: Apology and Information

This is the text of an email message I'm sending out which I thought I'd also post here:

Yesterday morning you may have received an email from “bharshaw at hotmail.com” with no subject which contained a url, probably ending in “176.xxx” where the “xxx” is a file type, usually an image one but not always. There was also a post on my facelessbureaucrat blog. I’m still not sure what happened but it appears my hotmail and possibly google passwords were hacked and someone used my email account to spam you. As far as I know now the url did not contain a virus (my wife got one, which she opened, but full scans of my PC using McAfee didn’t reveal any virus. But since I’m no expert:

1. if you did click on the url and open it, please be sure your security software is running and up-to-date. Let me know if you have any problems.
2. if you didn’t click on it, delete the message and congratulate yourself on following the prime rule for email safety: never open an unexpected url or attachment. Check first.

I’m now changing my passwords, following the experience of James Fallows after his wife’s account was hacked (see his http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/ –but don’t click on that—go to the Atlantic website and search for “Fallows password” to see the sequence of posts he put up. Long story short, he went to Lastpass, which is a  free password manager and permits you to have strong passwords for individual accounts.

My apologies for endangering your security.

.

Warning: I've Been Hacked

Sorry.

Kickstarter and Walt Jeffries II

I got around to looking at Kickstarter and Walt Jeffries' project, though I was careful not to lose myself in all the opportunities to give money, so I still can't give an informed opinion on the Kickstarter concept.

 I've no idea why people interested in local food production would be coming to this blog since I'm usually, not always but usually, skeptical of locavore/food movement things.  I do recommend Walt's blog, just for an example of thought and craftsmanship. I'm particularly struck by his violation of one of my favorite rules: you never do things right the first time.  But Walt's done several things which amaze me, the butcher shop being just the latest.