Surprise of the Day: Fewer Gun Owners

While the US has gotten much more permissive on issuing permits to carry guns, what's surprising is that gun ownership has declined very significantly in the last 40 years.  That's from John Sides at the Monkey Cage.  Once you stop to think, we've become a more suburban nation over the years, and suburbia doesn't hunt and often doesn't have guns.

Climate Change Bad News for Dairy

The "standup economist" has gotten links from Prof. Mankiw and Paul Solman at the Newshour.  He's funny, but he does serious research, including this paper projecting the decreased production of dairy cows resulting from higher temperatures of climate change.

The research has been so strong that it inspired progressive students to rally in support of Holsteins, as described here.

The GRH Zombie Rises from the Dead?

Reading the Congressional Research Service report on sequestration it seems to me that Gramm-Rudman-Hollings is starting to stir.  (GRH for the whippersnappers in the audience was the attempt in 1985 to fix federal budget deficits, by applying a flat percentage reduction to federal expenditures if certain conditions weren't met.  In 1986 we reduced deficiency payments by a factor (I think 4.6 percent) under GRH.  The result, when combined with the System 36 automation and the new farm bill, was total disaster administratively.  That was partially my fault because of the way we ended up applying payment limitation, and partially fiscals because we didn't have the coding and entries for refunds in place.) 

I wish FSA well if they have to apply sequestration in the new year.

No One Ever Washed a Rental Car

That's my best memory of something some economist once said.  Turns out the Zipcar is just another rental, according to this from Treehugger.  The advantage Zipcar presumably has is their continuing relationship with their customers and computers to track when their customers fudge on the agreement.  It's just another way in which modern Americans trade privacy for advantage in the age of the Internet.

The Promise of Satellites for Agriculture

Back in the day ASCS had an Aerial Photography Branch in the Farmer Programs Division (and two labs, one in Asheville and one in Salt Lake).  With Comsat Congress started the process of privatizing the exploitation of space (in 1962).  We were young then, and full of hope that science fiction dreams would come true.  So ASCS dipped its toe into the world of satellite sensing and satellite photography, thinking someday we'd be able to assess crop conditions and acreages from space. We had for a while someone stationed in Houston just to work with NASA on this area.

I'm not sure of the history between then and now, but this earthobservatory image from NASA shows what's possible now, in the way of assessing drought.

Question for Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney

What's your position on taking legislative action to help drought-stricken farmers in 2012?

Secretary Vilsack raised the question yesterday, suggesting Congress needed to act.

[Updated: via Obama Foodorama here's the briefing today at the White House--Vilsack is focusing on livestock producers. Back in the day we used to have the Livestock Feed Program for these sorts of situations but I guess it got cut.]

[Update II: Got around to doing what I should have done--check the FSA webpage.  Apparently the old LFP got reauthorized under different titles and in different forms, but the authorities in the 2008 farm legislation expired Oct 2011. ] 

Question of the Day?

"I wonder how the Cuban Missile Crisis would have gone down if Kennedy and Khrushchev had relied on Twitter instead of diplomatic cables?"

From a KevinDrum post noting Russia responded to the latest explosion in Syria via Twitter.

After This, the Deluge (of 2012 Disaster Ideas)

Chris Clayton quotes Sen. Stabenow pushing for House action on the farm bill, goes on to say:

"This [is] another reason to pass a farm bill now so that we can not only pass what we have in the farm bill now in terms of disaster assistance, but I think we need to be strengthening that for 2012," she said.

See my post on the 20 percent of uninsured farmers. When you live a long time, you can be prescient.

Abundance: the Book

Reading Abundance, the Future is Better Than You Think, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. It's an easy read, bringing into one place descriptions of a lot of the recent innovations which the authors believe will make the future better than the present.

Unfortunately, from my view, because they cover so much ground, everything from 3-D printing to DIY bioengineering to agriculture, they fall victim to some fads, including Despommiers and his vertical farming.  In the appendices they include references for some of the ideas found in the text: for vertical farming it's a url from www.the-edison-lightbulb.com, a website containing ideas mostly from the young.  The vertical farming bit is a Chicago fifth graders pitch for vertical farming.  Pretty sad.

Having dissed that portion of the book, the bulk of it is a fast overview of all the reasons to be optimistic about everything.  I strongly recommend it if you're depressed about the future, though I wouldn't bet on the accuracy of any specific ino.  (Diamandis offered the "X Prize" for private spaceships.)

Price Loss Coverage III

Okay, finally read the farm bill as of July 9 (link) re: price loss coverage.(See previous post here.)

The provision:

(A) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in
13 subparagraphs (B) through (D), the term ‘‘pay-
14 ment acres’’, with respect to the provision of
15 price loss coverage payments and revenue loss
16 coverage payments, means—
17 (i) 85 percent of total acres planted
18 for the year to each covered commodity on
19 a farm; and
20 (ii) 30 percent of approved total acres
21 prevented from being planted for the year to each covered commodity on a farm.
23 (B) MAXIMUM.—The total quantity of pay24
ment acres determined under subparagraph (A)
25 shall not exceed the farm base acres.
(C) REDUCTION.—If the sum of all pay
2 ment acres for a farm exceeds the limits estab
3 lished under subparagraph (B), the Secretary
4 shall reduce the payment acres applicable to
5 each crop proportionately.
6 (D) EXCLUSION.—The term ‘‘payment
7 acres’’ does not include any crop subsequently
8 planted during the same crop year on the same
9 land for which the first crop is eligible for pay10
ments under this subtitle, unless the crop was
crop was
11 approved for double cropping in the county, as
12 determined by the Secretary.

 The line numbers carry over in the copy process.  There's two considerations in determining acreage accuracy: (1) potentially exceeding a limit, which is what my previous posts discussed; (2) the accuracy of payment acreage. Based on the above, I was wrong on (1)--there's no program limit to be violated.  The only thing which looks like a limit is the farm base acreage, but if it's exceeded you just prorate out, so no big deal.

(2) however looks a bit different.  If I under report my planted acreage, I get less payment, so no harm to the program. But if I over report, because my payments are calculated on planted acreage, there's overpayment, so FSA would need to handle that and deter such over reporting.

The provision would mean that reports of planted acreage are needed, which was a big battle back in Freedom to Farm days (bureaucrats always worry about workload).