Not Total Unanimity in the Pigford Camp?

Here's a Legal Times piece reporting the disposition of a suit filed by John Boyd and the National Black Farmers Association against two of the attorneys involved in the Pigford litigation.   They were trying to get paid by the lawyers for some of their work.  The court dismissed the suit.

Reader Ratings

I have a lot of RSS feeds--used to use Google Reader for them but with its demise have now switched to Feedly.

For each feed, Feedly has a metric it labels "readers". I'm not sure what it means, but I suspect it's the number of Feedly users who have subscribed to the feed.  In my case the number is about 1 percent of my usual daily page views.  While it's possible some people, like nerds and geeks, are more likely to use an RSS feed than others, which would skew the results, the Feedly figure is one way to compare different sites. 

I'll perhaps update this listing as I get more energy.

Extension: 18
USDA 3
Grist 7K
Flowing Data 33K
Grasping REality (Brad DeLong) 1K
USA gov 187
FSA  43

Slate Blogs  4K
The Agenda  861
The Way of Improvement 164
USA gov  187
USDA FSA  43
Gov exec  551
Rural information center 5

Statistics and the "Midpoint": the Case of Dairy

Long long ago I used to be good in math.  No more, but I'm still intrigued by statistics.  A recent ERS study on the consolidation of farms introduced me to a new measure.

We all know the "mean", and some of us know the "mode" and the "median".  The ERS people are using the "midpoint", specifically for cropland.  It's defined (my words) as the number of acres of cropland on a farm such that half the cropland in the country is in farms larger than that, and half is on farms smaller than that.  Because the distribution of acreage among farms is so skewed, with many farms being very small, and a few farms being very large, they argue it gives a better picture of what's happened over the last 25 years.

Using the same concept for livestock, they say:

"In 1987, the midpoint dairy herd size was 80 cows; by 2007, it was 570 cows. The change in hogs was even more striking, from 1,200 hogs removed in a year to 30,000. But consolidation was widespread: midpoint head sold for fed cattle doubled between 1987 and 2007, while those for broilers and cow-calf operations (cattle, less than 500 pounds) more than double"

80 to 570 cows is jawdropping.

On the Joy of Riding

A discussion this morning of a young woman in 1917 whose father bought a Hupmobile which seated 7 and which the daughter used to visit soldiers training for war.  Last night we watched the last DVD of season 3 of Downton Abbey, which includes a feature where the historian advising the series talks about the freedom that cars brought to the upper classes, particularly Matthew's two-seater, which appears in the first episode and the last.

 That led to Googling "Hupmobile" which turned up a piece on a judge in 1909 passing sentence on "joy riders".    (I should note the joy riders here were, in fact, using a horse and wagon, not a car.)  The article includes this quote:

It is held by lawyers that this is the first conviction of the kind ever obtained. Its importance lies in the fact that it affords a means for reaching the many chauffeurs whose fondness for "joy rides" has become notorious. Hitherto it has been impossible to inflict, for offences of this character, such punishment as would prove a deterrent. If this conviction is upheld on appeal, however, it will probably put a stop to the practise. All that will be necessary will be to prosecute a few of the offenders and secure jail sentences against them. Then it will end.

Looking at the dictionary and wikipedia "joy ride" seems mostly to mean stealing a vehicle.  The first use of the term is shown as 1909. 

Trying to check that led me to Google "joy ride", since the Downton Abbey visually evoked the "joy" of "riding", or rather of driving. (And I remember my mother who often was ready for a drive, just to get out of the house and off the farm, though I don't recall her using the term "joy ride".)  As it turns out, there was a 1909 song written: Take Me Out for a Joy Ride.  This joy ride is in a car, and sex is involved, as is the unreliability of early automobiles, but no theft at all. 

Finally I did a Google ngram.  Surprisingly, the term appears occasionally in the 19th century, with sustained use around the turn of the century and its peak in 1917 or so.  These are books, not magazines or newspapers, so that must be remembered, particularly as there's  a later peak in 1942, right when wartime rationing of gas and tires would have kicked in.  (Maybe it's propaganda against senseless joy rides; use the car only for serious and essential business?)

Downton Abbey and British Agriculture

Been re-watching Downton Abbey, season 3.  What does it tell us about British agriculture, or at least farming on the Earl's estate?  (Caution: We probably can't assume Julian Fellowes is an expert on early 20th century agriculture.)

It appears that the estate includes a substantial acreage of farmland, divided into farms held by tenant farmers.  Remember that when Daisy the assistant cook visits Mr. Mason's (father of her late husband) farm, he tries to entice her to live with him by offering to make her his heir, inheriting all he has.  He describes that as essentially equipment and livestock, but not the land. We've no clue how much land he's farming, but he's obviously done well.  I'm not sure whether Mason is one of the Earl's tenants, but it indicates the pattern that existed, or Fellowes thinks existed, in Yorkshire.

When Matthew and Tom work out a plan to modernize the running of the estate, it includes offering the tenants a buy-out, so the land they are farming can be reworked into bigger estates.  Though there's no discussion of why bigger is better, season 2 did include scenes of Lady Edith driving a tractor.  Presumably that tractor was the farmer's, not the estate's, but being able to afford such modern labor-saving devices would require the tenant to farm more acreage.
 

Another Pigford II Article

This time from Shreveport, LA quoting John Boyd.

Newby Farmers in California

This NYTimes article from yesterday describes a couple going into farming in California.  300 acre farm.

The farm, which is about 40 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, cost $3.9 million, but the Smiths were able to get an open-space easement, financed through county sales tax initiatives, that returned $2.2 million, on the condition that their land never be developed. But with all the other start-up costs (infrastructure, machinery and initial livestock outlay), they still needed to borrow $5 million.

The couple want to emulate Polyface Farm (made famous by Prof. Pollan). So they have a staff of around a dozen.  I hope a few of those dozen know something about agriculture and something about business.

Asia Has a Rice Glut?

Only 5 years ago we were worried about high prices and scarcity.  At least for rice in Asia that seems no longer to be a problem

Bureaucrat of the Day--Michael Hoffman

He's head of the NY Passport office and seems to be doing a great job. 
The full Slate article is interesting, seeing a balance of autonomy within the standards of the larger organization as critical.

Question:  when will Yelp have profiles of the various USDA field offices?

[Seriously, I expect never, because the clientele of these offices doesn't change very often, so there's not much point in posting something on Yelp.  Then again, these days you never know.}

[Updated to add reference to Slate.]

The Potash Cartel?

This Wall Street Journal article reports on the end of the potash cartel.  I didn't know there was one.  But it's a reminder not all cartels and agreements in restraint of trade are leftover from the 1930's.