No-Till Farming

 I was going to use a snarky title for this, like urbanites find out about no-till farming, but instead I'll just refer to an article on Wonkblog.  From there a link to a Philpott piece on cover crops and no-till.  I remember when ASCS  offered cost-sharing for cover crops, back in the late 60's, something which was killed by the Nixon administration.  (I'm trying to remember what the CED said--he was aggressively promoting the practices, I think for workload, not specifically for the conservation benefits.

Ghosts of the Past

I'm always fascinated to see how history crops up in today's public discussions.  Here's Rep. Peterson talking about basing payments on base acres versus planted acres:

"Rep. Peterson also addressed policy issues associated with planted acres in yesterday’s radio interview with Joel Heitkamp: “But we’re having a fight with the Senate over planted acres versus base acres, and they want to pay people based on what they grew 20 years ago, and we don’t want to do that anymore. We want to go to planted acres. And what that does is it shifts the program, the balance of power, from landowners to farmers. And this is a fundamental change that needs to happen in our policy. We should be supporting farmers, not land. And that’s what we’ve been doing the last 20 years, ostensibly, to placate the WTO or whatever.
“But that’s one of the big hang-ups we’re having with the Senate right now. And some of them want to hang onto these base acres. Well, it’s kind of the same issue you’re talking about with the sugar program, where you’ve got people that have the land and have base on it are renting it to somebody else. It’s much better to have the program follow the farmer, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Now it so happens that in the South the landowner, the plantation owner, has always been at the top of the ladder.  And so it would seem it continues to be so today.

As quoted in Farm Policy.

The Most Un-Private Place in America?

Might be a farmer's fields, once the FAA gets off its rear and approves drones for farm use,  drones which can provide data down to the centimeter scale (.4 inch) according to a post on the Rural Blog, repeating an Agri-Pulse newsletter.

Paying Dead People

A very good article in the Post explaining why so many federal agencies have problems paying dead people.  Bottom line: problems in reporting deaths accurately and in sharing data between SSA and other agencies.

A part of FSA's problem is they can't access the full SSA Death file, but have to make do with a subset, apparently because of some restrictions some states put on sharing information.  (Jim Baxa is quoted in the article.)

Yes I Voted

Unenthusiastically, but I did.

Conservation Compliance and Crop Insurance

From today's Farm Policy, discussing farm bill prospects:

"And on conservation compliance, the veteran lawmaker indicated that, “Well, the Senate says they have to have it. They’ve had votes on it where it’s passed by a significant margin. I think, at the end of the day, we’re going to have conservation compliance. But I have been working on this, that if we have to have it—because right now the House is not for this—but if we have to have it, the insurance companies will not be responsible for policing this, so they won’t have to decide whether somebody is in compliance or not.”

I'm not sure the veteran lawmaker (ranking member of House ag) understands conservation compliance, in that I don't know how one would ever require the insurance companies to police it.  Seems to me it would work essentially like the cotton/rice co-ops. 

Broccoli and Industrial Farming

NYTimes Magazine has an article on broccoli,partly discussing efforts to make eating broccoli attractive, partly discussing a farmer in upstate New York:

The farm that he runs with his three brothers and one of their sons is an example of the kind of nonindustrial farm that’s necessary in a revamped vision of American food production and consumption. Last year, Reeves turned out 420,000 pounds of tomatoes, 65,000 pounds of strawberries and 2.4 million ears of sweet corn. And while they have a nice little farm stand just outside the small town of Baldwinsville, with a quaint patch of pick-your-own organic blueberries behind the sales shed, they mostly sell their crops to big grocers, including Tops, Price Chopper, Wegmans and, biggest of all, Walmart.  [emphasis added]

As I wrote in a comment on the article, the food movement tends to label farming operations they don't like as "industrial farming" and "corporate agriculture".  It's not clear to me whether the three brothers are a partnership or corporation but here's the website

MIDAS Updated

The MIDAS page on the FSA website has been updated.http://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/midas?area=home&subject=landing&topic=landing

I'd say it was about time.  Certainly the MIDAS effort has been focused on the FSA bureaucrats, not the public.

ACA IT and Testing

I can't resist the temptation to comment on the healthcare software process.  (BTW, here's a link to their blog.)

They've taken hits for not fully testing, which I can agree with.  On the other hand, remembering the test process we had for System/36 software, I can only imagine the problems they would have had. If my imagination is right, they had these choices for beginning to end testing:

• use live data--i.e., have all the 20-something IT types try to sign up for health insurance for real using their software.  That has some obvious problems, particularly when you have to cover 36 state exchanges. 
• create test data.  The problem here is while you can create applicants, you need to have SS numbers which meet the SSA criteria, and/or you need to create credit histories over at Experian, then you need to tack on test data for those SSN's with IRS, etc. 
• use a subset of live data for test data.  That's what we used to do--get a copy of a counties files in and modify the data to create test conditions. That's very problematic, both from a security standpoint and from a Privacy Act standpoint. And  our FSA system was simple compared to the sort of system ACA requires.

UK Versus US: Enclosed Farmland

An interesting piece in Buzzfeed (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution) on Britain's housing problems. But I want to steal one of its 15 graphics:

Note the "enclosed farmland" category, which basically covers most of England and Ulster, plus bits of lowlands Scotland. 

Trying to find the equivalent for the US.  There's this NASS map, which can get very detailed--I'd never seen it before. 

And there's this map of "prime farmland". 

What's important I think is that farmland in the US is much more splotchy; the UK is much more uniformly developed as either farm or urban.