How Far Should Transparency Go?

This site accesses federal government employees' salaries, by name.  It appears to exclude FSA county employees and doesn't cover all departments.  It was fun looking up the salaries of the few people at FSA who still work there.  Fun for me, I'm not sure for them.

In principle I'm all for this.  Of course my annuity isn't reported there.  :-)

Crop Insurance Abroad

A piece on crop insurance in other countries.  Apparently it's being adopted more and more.  In China:

"China’s comprehensive financial support for its farming sector was $156 billion for the year 2011, which included insurance premiums, disease and fire prevention resources and insurance licenses.  Insurance covers crops and livestock and is typically a combination of compensation offered by the central government, the provincial governments and even some city governments. "

Personally I'd question the dollar figure--it might well be the result of a purchasing power conversion.  However, what's the chances of our getting into an "arms race" on the farm front with the Chinese--i.e., "how can our poor farmers compete when our government only provides X dollars in support when the Chinese provides so much more?"  :-)

Political Correctness from 1940

Been reading Lynn Olson's "Those Angry Days" on the fight over the U.S. entering WWII.  It's good, well written and an interesting subject which she handles reasonably objectively.

One factoid which reminds me both how different the past was, and how similar.   A movie [Pastor Hall]was banned in Chicago (remember the days when movies were banned?) because of a Chicago law which prohibited the denigration of any race or ethnicity and the local board thought it was anti-German in its depiction of the treatment of the Jews.

[Updated to add link to movie title, which was based on Rev. Martin Niemuller.]

Stop the Presses: Foodie Says Not All Industrial Food Is

Evil!!  Mark Bittman, the NYTimes resident foodie, has a piece with that title.  He finds some virtue in the canned tomatoes produced by a California grower in Yolo County and canned by a co-op.

The grower is: "

Rominger Brothers Farms is a progressive, diversified family farm and ranch located north of Winters, California. Brothers Rick and Bruce Rominger are fifth-generation Yolo County farmers. They produce many different crops using organic and conventional techniques, including winegrapes, processing tomatoes, rice, wheat, corn, safflower, sunflower, onions, alfalfa and oat hay. As stewards of the land, Bruce and Rick are committed to growing crops in ways that protect the environment, such as minimizing the use of crop protection materials, using drip irrigation to conserve water and using sheep to graze crop residue."

They've 6,000 acres, 40 employees, grow 80 acres of tomatoes and hope to clear $500 an acre. Best I can tell the tomatoes aren't organic.

Bittman's impressed that the canned tomatoes taste better than fresh supermarket ones, but I wonder whether he did a taste test controlling for salt levels.  But still, I have to give him credit for having an open mind.

He does end with a plea for more unionization (though the co-op is unionized) and/or upping the minimum wage.  How he reconciles that with the acknowledgement that " the processed tomato market is international, with increasing pressure from Italy, China and Mexico..." I don't know. 

A side note--the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton era was Richard Rominger; I wonder if there's any relationship?

American Exceptionalism: Biggest, Best, Baddest?

The question in the title was prompted by a comment on a blog post which said, in effect, American racism was uniquely bad.

Seems to me while it was bad, and some still remains, it doesn't qualify for that description.  Maybe the writer is falling prey to American exceptionalism, which says we must always be at the top, and if not at the top at the bottom?

WTO Fades Away

That's my read of this statement from Collin Peterson as reported in Farm Policy:

“As for a coming House-Senate conference, Peterson said he told Senate Ag Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., ‘there will be target prices’ in the Title I safety net program and ‘they will be based on planted acres not to exceed base acres.’ He noted that some commodity groups are ‘simply wrong’ to press base acres rather than planted acres for any target price payments. ‘We can’t sell that to Congress any more … about paying for acres not planted.’”

My recollection is that the WTO believes that paying on planted acres encourages production, which is limited under its rules for agriculture.

Another Pigford II

From High Plains Journal

Based on the data given by the lawyers, about 55 percent of the claimants in the Pigford II case were successful in winning claims, Zippert said. This is slightly less than the 63 percent who prevailed in Pigford I, a surprise to Zippert. He had expected the success rate to reach more than 70 percent in Pigford II, in part because the claimants no longer had to identify a similarly situated white farmer who was not denied help by FSA.

Mormons, USDA, and Conservatism

Back in the day there was a "Mormon mafia" in USDA--I think because Ezra Taft Benson had been Secretary under Eisenhower, which resulted in a fair number of lower level employees coming from Utah, including the guy who took me on my first trip to Kansas City, back when the airport was by the river.

Since then I worked with a few Mormons, which probably led me to click through from Brad DeLong's blog to this post by a liberal who notes that Mormons have mostly avoided the problems which other conservative areas of the country have encountered. 

Whenever I run into generalizations about American culture, I think of the Amish, the Mormons, the Native Americans, the Hasidic Jews--Americans all but often exceptions to generalizations.

New York Dairy, Greeks, and Immigrants

Chris Clayton at DTN has a long piece about New York dairymen's need for immigrants.  They're expanding production to supply the desire for Greek yogurt.  A quote:

"Emerling Farms is a 1,200-head operation run by John and his son, Mike. The Emerlings have 20 full-time employees, and like a growing number of larger dairies, most of those workers are immigrants. John Emerling said he realizes some people don't understand the need for immigrant labor, particularly when unemployment remains high. "But it wouldn't matter what we paid. People just wouldn't answer."

 So that's roughly 60 cows per person.  That's not all that different than back when I was growing up, though these cows probably produce 20,000+ lbs per year, while the average back then was about 1/3 of that.  (We did good with 10-11,000.)

Dairy isn't an easy life.  (IMHO only those farmers who have to feed their livestock and milk them twice or thrice a day merit the name of true "farmers", but I won't push that.  One advantage of the dairy/poultry life is you get checks coming in throughout the year; you don't have one harvest and one big check which has to be budgeted to last.)

Ambiguous Post Title of the Day

From the Des Moines Register: "Grassley Legislation Would Help Bankrupt Farmers".

I wonder whether people are equally likely to read "bankrupt" as noun or verb?