Conservation Compliance Overview from CRS

Via STu Ellis at farmgate, here's the latest CRS summary of conservation compliance. A good overview for Congress, but doesn't break new ground for me except:

• seeing the reduction in soil erosion since 1985.
• noting that OIG was doing a 2-phase review of it, the first phase was in 2008, no report has been issued on the second phase yet.  (Who polices the policeman?)

Budget Baselines

Via EWG, here's the Congressional Research Service's discussion of the budget baseline for the next farm bill.  It shows a baseline of $90 billion over the next 10 years for crop insurance, including roughly $1.3/4 billion in delivery expenses.  Interestingly, the administrative expenses for NRCS and FSA aren't included in the discussion.

Conservation Compliance and NRCS

Via Farm Policy, the Grand Forks Herald reports on a backlog of wetland determinations at NRCS, a big enough issue to get the agency head out there.

From the article:

Wetlands determinations that are held up, waiting for NRCS approval, have become frustrating for the region’s farmers, particularly those in the central and southern Red River Valley. They want to use tile drainage or water management to contend with a string of wet years, and to capitalize on higher commodity prices and land values.

Apparently NRCS is looking at using a 30-year average, dropping extreme years and coming up with an average.

This sentence struck me: "White [head of NRCS] said he thinks USDA can approve some of the procedures in a month." I wonder. If there's no one to challenge the changes, he's probably right. But if Ducks Unlimited or others think it's unwise/unfair, I'd assume they'd have to go through rule-making, though on the third hand I'm not sure how much rule-making NRCS does.  In the old days that wasn't part of the agency's culture, simply because they were always helping farmers, never hurting them.

Once again this is in the pothole area, and is a caution to us bureaucrats who assume once you identify a thing, it's that thing forever.

A Great Parenthetical Statement

"(Liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant's fingers along with a patient's leg, according to Hollingham. The patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.)"

Atul Gawande, on 200 years of surgery, here.

India and the Caste System

Via Tyler Cowen, a post on the Indian caste system.  What's interesting to me is the way the whole structure of society enforces the system--i.e., no thought of the household doing its own waste and cleaning, even though the dalit who owns the franchise doesn't do a good job.  To be fair to the writer, I suspect that's partly the lack of supplies and support (no Home Depots in India?) and the difficulty of the job, probably being more difficult than here, but also prestige--cleaning one's own toilet would lose face.

Given the location of the post, some may see it as a conservative take on the system, but even so it's informative.

It's always fascinating to see how humans can contort themselves into knots.

Cross Compliance

In the old days "cross-compliance" simply meant if you participated in the program for crop A on your farm you couldn't expand your acreage of crop B. ("Offsetting compliance"  meant you could n't expand your acreage on other farms if you participated in one farm.

These days "cross compliance" refers to sod/swamp, and it's controversial.  A set of organizations sent a letter asking for no cross compliance.  Former NRCS chiefs sent a letter supporting it.

The requirement was in effect from 1986 to 1995.  I suspect, but don't know, that it wasn't very effective.  SCS and ASCS had big problems working out how to enforce it and I suspect FCIC/RMA was never much involved, at least until well into the 90's.

In thinking about the possible problems with such a provision, a good part of the problem is timing. Ideally the first contact a farmer has with a USDA agency, including crop insurance agency, should involve a checking of the conservation compliance status for the farmer's operation.  If she has highly erodible land is there a conservation plan of operation in place and up-to-date?  If there's wetland, what's the status? If there's a problem, the farmer needs to fix it or bypass crop insurance.  In the 90's sharing access to that information would be difficult because it wasn't all in one place.  These days it should be technically feasible, if probably still bureaucratically difficult.

I wonder if crop insurance is subject to the administration's Do Not Pay rules?

The Size of a One-Person Farm: 2,000 Acres?

From FarmDocDaily's discussion of possible payment limitations on crop insurance:

A significant number of family farms with one full-time operator would exceed acre limits between 1,800 and 2,700 acres.

That's bigger than the average Illinois grain farm.  I continue to be amazed by how productive our farms are.

Conservatives Against Farm Bill

The good folks at Washington Times find conservatives who see dangers in the new farm bill as reported out by Senate Ag--if prices drop the government's exposure increases.

Wish I Was the Lovable Fool

From Barking Up the Wrong Tree:

"The best predictor of team success in the workplace is how the members feel about one another. In a choice between working with a lovable fool and a competent jerk, people almost always choose the lovable fool no matter what they say they want."

Sodsaver Provision

The Sustainable Ag coalition blogs about sodsaver/cross compliance here.  They say:

While the Sodsaver provision in the Senate bill does not, as we had proposed, deny all crop insurance subsidies on newly broken out land, it does provide for a 50 percent reduction in the subsidy.  It also includes two important provisions that prevent people from gaming the system to increase their revenue insurance coverage at the expense of taxpayers and the environment.  One keeps the newly broken out land isolated from other crop acres the producer may have when calculating insurable yields.  The other requires the operator to take a percentage of the county average yield until being able to show a multi-year yield history.

They go on to note a similar provision in the 2008 act was neutered. I assume enforcing this would require the insurance agents to access FSA data.

I wonder how the GIS system handles history--can you go back through historical land use layers?  This sort of issue, breaking out "noncropland" for annual crops has been a perennial issue in ag programs.  One question I'm not sure ever got answered is: does cropland ever become noncropland, when "noncropland" the land hasn't yet been devoted to "nonagricultural uses".

I remember one of the Great Plains state specialists assuring me that the county office would know the different between land which had once been cropped and land which had never been cropped.  I was dubious then and am more dubious today.