Distinguished Lawyer/Bureaucrat: Ralph Linden

According to this Government Executive post, Ralph Linden is one of the USDA winners and one of 54 Presidential  Distinguished Rank Award winners. (If I remember, the "Rank" honors a former bureaucrat Ralph's in OGC--used to be the main attorney for FSA matters. The detail in the story doesn't include a description of his special accomplishments, though I'd suspect it's for his cumulative career. 

A good man.

OIG's Thoughts

Via Chris Clayton at DTN, USDA's OIG has a report out reviewing the results of their and GAO's audits as in the light of lessons for the new farm bill:

• they ding RMA and NRCS for deficient controls over operations and they're going to look at FSA controls on the biomass program.
• SNAP--going to compare SNAP database with SSA's Death file.
• staffing and workforce planning issues for FSA, FS, and FSIS.
• concerns for FSA on peanut prices (NASS inaccurate), controls on farm-stored collateral, and problems with MILC "dairy operation" definitions.
• concerns for NRCS on controls of conservation easements and management controls for CSP
• concerns for FNS on SNAP: checking background of participating retailers, security of the EBT system and control of SNAP retailer fraud
• FSA controls over emergency loans, over loan collateral, over interest rates on guaranteed loans

It's All in the Spin: Farm Bill

."Farmers will no longer be paid for crops they are not growing, will not be paid for acres that are not actually planted, and will not receive support absent a drop in price or yields."

From the press release from Chairwoman Stabenow.  That's all very well and good, but years ago the spin was something to the effect of:  "Farms will no longer be locked into growing a specific crop to earn benefits and will have flexibility to plant any crop they wish."  I'm still wondering about the WTO classification on the draft.

[Updated to add "Years ago", as when Pat Roberts, the ranking Republican on the Senate committee, was pushing Freedom to Farm as chair of House Ag.]

Meta Study of Organic Farms

The LA times reports on a study in Nature which looked at studies of organic agriculture, finding an average 20 percent difference in productivity.  The impact varies by crop, with annuals more affected than perennials and fruits.  

One commenter spins:

In fact, in cases in which growers used techniques that are considered to be the best practices for organic farming, the gap between organic and conventional yields narrowed to 13%.
"If you do things as well as you can, then the yield difference is very small," Cavigelli said.

There's no indication of whether the non-organic farms were using their "best practices", but my cynical self suspects they weren't.  There's also no indication of whether the comparison was crop to crop, or acre to acre (the latter meaning the total productivity of an acre over several years).

When Old Men Frown on Young Men Carousing

Sen. McCain is to be honored for his service, but....  From what I've read of his life, he was a world-class carouser when a midshipman at Annapolis and well into middle age, excepting the years when he was in the Hanoi Hilton.  So I can only smile at his outrage over the recent Secret Service/military hooha.  The men involved showed bad judgment and poor morals, but it's a bit sanctimonious for Sen. McCain to cast a stone.  If consorting with a prostitute is cause to lose one's federal job, Sen. Vitter should be sent back to Louisiana.

Flash from the Committee: Pay Limit

Chris Clayton reports the Senate Ag committee plans to wrap up its version of the 2012 farm bill today.  He says:

The bill considered by the committee on Thursday also lowered the adjusted gross income eligibility to $750,000. Moreover, the bill makes major changes to language involving "actively engaged" to further restrict who is eligible for payments.

There will be a study to determine the feasibility of whether popcorn should be considered a commodity crop.

 Apparently they agreed to tweak the bill enough to satisfy the cotton/rice/peanut group.[Updated: according to Politico they did something for cotton, but not peanuts and rice, much to the disgust of  Chambliss and Cochran.]

Get Educated and Live Longer

Ran across a map of the country this morning, the URL for which I lost, but here's a close replacement, showing color-coded counties, representing their life expectancy.  The pattern is for the coasts to have the highest life expectancy, Appalachia, the Delta, and reservations to have the lowest.

The color coding meant that there was only one county in upstate New York which stood out as long-lived: Tompkins county.  Why?  That's where Ithaca is, the home of Ithaca College and Cornell University.  Education makes a difference.  Maybe the best way to cut healthcare expenditures is to improve our education system?

[Updated with the url from the Rural Blog which triggered this post. Interesting how color coding and different metrics affect one's perspective.]

Great Bureaucrats: Bob Mondloch

Bob Mondloch and I (and Les Fredrickson) worked together in the early 70's on the MAP (Management Analysis Project--think Business Process Reengineering 20 years before that buzzphrase came in existence). Bob was a good man, sharp, hardworking, good judgment, sense of humor.  He'd been detailed from whatever the conservation division was called in those days--must have been when Nixon and Earl Butz were trying to kill the Agricultural Conservation Program to MAP as its executive director. At that time he was either assistant to the director of the conservation division or deputy, but he may have become director right before he died. He died very young, or so it seems to me now, probably in his early 40's, I think of a heart attack, and probably before 1976. 

Bob was one of a group of youngish men who moved from the field to DC in the 60's to replace the generation which had run the agency since the New Deal days and WWII.  Some found other jobs as the Republicans downsized ASCS and the boom in commodity prices seemed to be making the agency obsolete.  Some stayed on and led the agency through the 70's and 80's.

Anyhow, I ran across a reference to Mondloch House and tracked down this page, which offers a side of Bob I never knew about, but which is no surprise at all.  A notice of the marriage of a son in 1991 says Bob's widow was chaplain at Mount Vernon Hospital.

Farm Bill Delayed

Trying to keep everyone happy is hard, and Sen. Stabenow didn't succeed with her draft farm bill.  Politico and others observe the peanut and rice people are upset, so consideration of the draft in committee was delayed. 

In Defense of Bricks and Mortar

I've often said giving farmers on-line access to FSA programs/operations is the wave of the future.  But now I need to recognize the other side.  Here's a post at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog on the virtues of opening storefronts to sell Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance. It will possibly take another generation before Americans are equal to the challenge of understanding online applications.  Maybe even longer.  (I'm sure it will come eventually.) Until then, there's a role for hand holding and in-person explanations.