Best Practices, Reinvented

I am reading a biography of Seaman Knapp, sometimes called the father of the extension service.

One of the big problems in agriculture around 1900 was dissemination.  Researchers at the experiment stations and people in the field had identified ways to grow more and better plants and animals, but they couldn't convince farmers to change their habits and adopt new methods.

The description was reminiscent of the "best practices" fad in the 1990's: the idea that business consultants could identify what the best organizations were doing and then inject them into other organizations.

Lots of reasons why the idea doesn't work nearly as well as it ought to.  For one thing, a "best practice" identified by an outsider is likely to oversimplify, to miss some features of the organization's culture which are critical to success.  And importing a "best practice" under the auspices of some high-paid outsider is likely to raise the hackles (does anyone these days know what a "hackle" is) of the people who've been doing the work, in their minds pretty successfully.

[Updated: see this Technology Review post on why Silicon Valley can't be duplicated.]

The Modern Sisyphus or Diogenes

In the Sisyphus myth, the king was fated to roll a stone uphill forever, each only to see it roll back down.  That was my first thought in considering the blog The Daily Howler, written by Bob Somerby.

Mr. Somerby seems always to be disappointed by the truthfulness of media, particularly mainstream media.  The "always" brought Sisyphus to mind, but then I see the king's offense against the gods was to be deceitful and to try to outwit Zeus himself.  So that doesn't work particularly well.

So then I thought of Diogenes, who supposedly wandered the world with lamp in hand, looking for and not finding an honest man.  Maybe that's closer; Mr. Somerby is our modern Diogenes.  Perhaps fitting, since Diogenes was a Cynic.

Or maybe we're fellows under the skin, both nitpickers supreme. 

Anyhow, I recommend occasional dips in the blog, though perhaps Mr. Somerby is wandering the blogosphere with lamp in hand, searching for and not finding the Art of Brevity.

Taxing CRP Payments

The title of this post at Sustainable Ag,  U.S. Tax Court: Federal Self-Employment Tax Applies to Non-Farmer’s CRP Payment,pretty well describes the content.

 It interests me because it involves determining that the owner of land in CRP is not automatically in the business of farming (assuming I understand it correctly).  The theory seems to be that while the owner is being compensated for activities required by the CRP contract, that's not farming but a business.

The EU, Payment Limits, Conservation, and WTO

One of the features of "Freedom to Farm", the 1996 direct payments program, was that it complied with WTO restrictions, meaning basically it didn't affect what crops were grown or not grown.  Regardless of what the farmer did, she was guaranteed the payment as long as she didn't sell the land for a suburban development.   The vision at that time, the height of the Washington consensus,  was that the world was gradually moving away from government subsidies and intervention in agricultural affairs.  Oxfam and other international groups beat the U.S. around the head and shoulders for the distortions introduced by our farm programs, particularly the adverse effects of the cotton program on Third World cotton producers.  But 17 years have passed since that law was enacted and the climate of opinion in the world has changed.  It looks as if we'll replace the direct payments program with crop insurance subsidies without much concern for WTO rules, even though the subsidies obviously affect what's planted.   Has the Great Recession created more tolerance for government intervention, more economic nationalism?

This BBC piece (hat tip John Phipps) shows some of the factors also affecting the EU's redo of their farm policy.

The Importance of What's Underneath

MIT's Technology Review reports on research explaining "fairy circles"., at least those in grassland mostly in South Africa.  It seems it's caused by competition among plant roots.

RSS Feeds and GMO Technology

Just trying to get ready for the end of Google Reader, meaning I'm looking at some stuff which has remained unread. 

Predictably some of the food movement have attacked the award of the prize to Monsanto scientist, claiming that the technology doesn't increase food supply or help with nutritious or sustainable food.  Accepting that position for sake of argument, genetic modification will still prove its worth, as in this case of obtaining resistance to wheat rust.

Good Sentence of the Week

" Biting people is hard, and people tend to notice when you try it."

From Ezra Klein's review of World War Z--interesting in the parallels of zombies to viruses and werewolves to sex.

The Box and CubeSats

There's a good book on the development of containers, as in container ships, which by permitting the a standardization of the loading and unloading of ships greatly reduced costs and permitted global supply chains.  It's called "The Box"

And here's an interesting piece on a plan for a fleet of small satellites to take photos of the earth  It seems they're going to use CubeSats, which is a standardized module for launching scientific instruments into space. Apparently the concept is on its way to being as important for science as the container is for transportation.

Defeat of Farm Bill

Keith Good at Agfax writes about the defeat of the farm bill, including some interesting discussion from Craig Jagger, who blames the defeat in part on the changes in Congressional rules.   I liked this:

Furthermore, the BGov Study stated that, “In addition, explicit timing shifts were used to capture ‘savings’ of $2.6 billion over 10 years for the 2002 farm bill and $4.5 billion over 10 years for the 2008 farm bill. Timing shifts move costs outside the 10-year budget window. The CBO scores savings for the shifts even though only the timing, not the amount, of program costs change. Those explicit timing shifts are not available for the 2013 farm bill, because all that could be identified have been used and each timing shift can be used only once…When major program changes are being made, having extra money to make them more palatable to those losing benefits makes writing legislation easier. This farm bill process undoubtedly has been more contentious and difficult from not having extra money above its baseline that recent farm bills had. Now to add funding for a new program or to increase funding for an existing program, funding for a different Agriculture Committee program that has a baseline needs to be cut, robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Bottomline: the Ag committee had run out of tricks to ease the pain.

Concrete Canoes and Leadership

What makes a concrete canoe float?  That question, along with some others, is answered in this NYTimes article today. 

Who knew the civil engineers had a whole competition among colleges to make concrete canoes?  And it's been going on for years? 

Buried in the text is the observation that success in the competition takes a combination of leadership and finding people willing to do the drudgery, like sanding down the concrete so the canoe moves well through the water.   Leadership and drudgery are the keys to success in many things, IMHO.