The Good of Polar Vortexes

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm rather blood thirstily identifies a major major benefit of the current polar vortex.  (Joel Achenbach at the Post has the proper fogey attitude towards new-fangled concepts, like polar vortex.)

What's the benefit?  Below the break

RMA Done Good?

From a post on "best practices", one of which was an RMA initiative:

To counter fraud, waste, and abuse, the Agriculture Risk Protection Act of 2000 mandated the use of a data warehouse and data mining technologies to improve crop insurance program compliance and integrity. RMA asked the Center for Agriculture Excellence (CAE) at Tarleton State University to create a system to monitor and analyze the program, identifying fraud using satellite, weather, and remotely sensed data to analyze claims filed by farmers for anomalous behavior that could indicate fraudulent or other improper payments. CAE is at the leading edge of application of remote sensing to agricultural insurance.
The RMA program has had several significant impacts, including:

• Identification of anomalous claims, plus monitoring as a preventive measure
• Linking claims histories with weather data
• Integration of the latest MODIS and Landsat satellite data into the data mining process
• Automated claims analysis

The results: cost avoidance of over $1.5 billion (2001–2007) scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Estimated reductions from prior year indemnities represent more than a $23 return for every dollar spent by RMA on data mining since its inception.
One initiative produced a list of producers who were subjected to increased compliance oversight; from 2001 to 2011, this reduced unneeded indemnity payments by approximately $838 million.

Paperless FSA Operations

"The USDA Farm Service Agency offices are moving toward a paperless operation."

That's from a piece on producers receiving material by email.

I remember when the System/36 back in 1984 was being justified as allowing us to move to a paperless office.  Not sure that ever worked out.

Duplication and the USDA Cloud

From FCW on the USDA cloud:

In 1962 — in the early days of mainframe computing, punched cards and tape — then-Secretary Orville Lothrop Freeman wrote a memo warning that USDA was headed down a path of duplicative spending on IT programs.
The memo was unearthed earlier this year by someone in USDA’s National IT Center (NITC) around the time the group was pushing for certification for its private cloud under the government’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). In June, USDA’s cloud offering became just the sixth infrastructure as a service to receive provisional certification under those federal security standards. It joined private-sector giants such as Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, CGI Federal, Autonomic Resources and Lockheed Martin.

Not sure what significance the USDA cloud has, it certainly won't produce rain for drought-ridden areas, but I enjoyed the reference to Freeman.  Used to be ASCS had computer centers in New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Kansas City but towards the end of Freeman's tour they got transferred over to the Department.  Minneapolis was shut down, along with a satellite center in Portland, if memory serves.  Over the years the other agencies in USDA also had some reorgs, but I notice that we still have centers in St. Louis (which I think is the old FmHA center) and Kansas City.  I suspect that means that the integration of agency operations into a seamless web where historic divisions are not obvious to the user is not happening.  C'est la vie.

Good News for the New Year: Going on to College

I think I owe a hattip to Wonkblog for a link to 13 data tables from Pew Research, all of which are interesting, though most are depressing.  But the one which is good news to me is this, showing that Hispanics who graduate from high school are going on to college at a higher rate than whites, and both blacks and Hispanics have improved their rates over the past 12 years.

Weird Sentence of the Day--Obamacare

From Wonkblog on Obamacare:

""The fact that they have about 2 million enrolled is not that far off from 3.3 million."

Sorry--in my math 2 million is a tad over 60 percent of 3.3, which in my dictionary is "pretty far off" from 3.3.

(I think I know what he was trying to say, but he didn't say it.

A Myth of Vietnam

The process of creating history about events in which I've been a (small) part is somewhat disorienting and rather disturbing.  It makes you wonder about the accuracy of history generally.

For example, Vietnam.

In season 3, episode 7 of Mad Men, which is set in 1963 Don Draper picks up a hitchhiking couple who are trying to evade the draft for fear the man will be sent to Vietnam.  Baloney.   We didn't have many troops in Vietnam then.   As advisors, very few draftees would have been included.  Through 1964 only 1 percent of the troops who were killed were draftees.  There were 200 deaths in 1955-63, and another 216 in 1964.

The first draft cards were burned in the summer of 1964, and Joan Baez leading an anti-war demonstration of 600 people in San Francisco is the earliest noted in Wikipedia.

While Vietnam attracted a lot of press attention in the early 60's, I don't remember it as having much impact on the general public.  Apparently Gallup didn't start polling until August 65, when 61 percent of the public said Vietnam troops wasn't a mistake.

Now comes the Coen Brothers with a new film: Inside Llewin Davies, in which they create a funny song: Please Mr. Kennedy from the kernel of a real song, which supposedly in 1961 asked JFK not to draft the singer and send him to Vietnam.   Hitflix has a piece on it, including links to relevant songs.  The 1962 song does not refer at all to Vietnam; it's just a potential draftee asking not to be drafted because Peggy Sue loves him, he hopes. 

Because the 60's ended with Vietnam being a seemingly all-absorbing topic, people today are assuming it was a big deal all the way through the decade.  It wasn't.

I write the above as someone who had a student deferment while in college, but who was drafted in 1965 and did some time in Vietnam (REMF).

"Mr. Custer" was a 1960 Larry Verne ditty written by Al DeLory about a soldier's plea to General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn not to send him off into battle. It was parodied one year later by Jim Nesbitt with "Please Mr. Kennedy," about blue collar America reaching out to the President for a helping hand. Then there was Mickey Woods' 1962 Motown track, also called "Please Mr. Kennedy" about a Vietnam draftee pleading with the President not to ship him away until his girlfriend marries him (because he's convinced she'll run off with another man while he's away).
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/how-please-mr-kennedy-was-born-and-why-its-not-eligible-for-oscar-consideration#eOsbjo8XKUFF0cZp.99

"Mr. Custer" was a 1960 Larry Verne ditty written by Al DeLory about a soldier's plea to General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn not to send him off into battle. It was parodied one year later by Jim Nesbitt with "Please Mr. Kennedy," about blue collar America reaching out to the President for a helping hand. Then there was Mickey Woods' 1962 Motown track, also called "Please Mr. Kennedy" about a Vietnam draftee pleading with the President not to ship him away until his girlfriend marries him (because he's convinced she'll run off with another man while he's away).
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/how-please-mr-kennedy-was-born-and-why-its-not-eligible-for-oscar-consideration#eOsbjo8XKUFF0cZp.99

"Mr. Custer" was a 1960 Larry Verne ditty written by Al DeLory about a soldier's plea to General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn not to send him off into battle. It was parodied one year later by Jim Nesbitt with "Please Mr. Kennedy," about blue collar America reaching out to the President for a helping hand. Then there was Mickey Woods' 1962 Motown track, also called "Please Mr. Kennedy" about a Vietnam draftee pleading with the President not to ship him away until his girlfriend marries him (because he's convinced she'll run off with another man while he's away).
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/how-please-mr-kennedy-was-born-and-why-its-not-eligible-for-oscar-consideration#eOsbjo8XKUFF0cZp.99

"Mr. Custer" was a 1960 Larry Verne ditty written by Al DeLory about a soldier's plea to General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn not to send him off into battle. It was parodied one year later by Jim Nesbitt with "Please Mr. Kennedy," about blue collar America reaching out to the President for a helping hand. Then there was Mickey Woods' 1962 Motown track, also called "Please Mr. Kennedy" about a Vietnam draftee pleading with the President not to ship him away until his girlfriend marries him (because he's convinced she'll run off with another man while he's away).
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/how-please-mr-kennedy-was-born-and-why-its-not-eligible-for-oscar-consideration#eOsbjo8XKUFF0cZp.99

GMO Q and A

I'm usually, not always but usually, opposing the crunchies and the food movement.  But this assessment of GMO varieties strikes me as solid.  And his recommendation for labeling GMO's, which I disagree with, may in fact end up as the only practical way to go.  After all, if everything we eat in the US is labeled "GMO", then nothing is.

ACA and FSA MIDAS

Being old, I've no need to sign up for Obamacare, so I've no personal experience with the website.  From what I've read, however, apparently the "navigators" who are helping people sign up are using the same software/website as those who are signing up on their own.  If so, that seems wise to me.  It's hard enough to keep one set of software operational and supporting the program.  It would be much harder to keep two sets up-to-date: one set for the public and one set for the government employees.  It would be particularly challenging when you have legislation passed late which requires changes to implement.

I don't know how MIDAS is set up, but I hope they've followed the same approach. 

Is BLS Missing the Food Movement?

Government Executive has a piece on the Bureau of Labor Statistics predictions of job growth by occupation over the next 10 years.  It's interesting, but BLS projects that jobs in agriculture will shrink (-3.4 percent), the only occupation for which that's true.  However, the piece revisits the predictions from 2002.  It turns out they had predicted a 2 percent drop in ag jobs, but the reality was a 7.4 percent increase!

That might tie into the increase the Ag census has seen in the number of farms, which in turn might be driven by the popularity of organic and niche farm products, otherwise known as the food movement.  I can see it growing, particularly as Whole Foods (we own shares) does more linking with local producers and moves into smaller cities, like Boise, Idaho.