The Iron Triangle and Ideology

I've been looking at the history of FmHA recently.  Post WWII it started off mostly lending to farmers, operating and ownership loans.  Over time successive legislation gradually widened the scope to include lending for housing, for community facilities, to towns <2,500 people expanding to 50,000. 

I suspect, without researching it, that most if not all of these expansions went through without too much partisan controversy or debate. I see the "iron triangle" at work: the FmHA bureaucrats, the lobbyists, and the Congressional committees working together to push the changes through and with support from rural representatives of both parties.  I don't see ideology as playing much of a role, except a generic pro-rural development stance.  Just guessing, I'd think partisan politics probably comes into play more when a new agency is being created, when it's not a matter of adding functions to an existing agency which already has a bureaucracy with ties to Congress and to interest groups but creating something mostly from scratch.

Did Vilsack Read the USDA Strategic Plan?

Apparently Robert Gates didn't read the President's plans--Tom Ricks discusses Gates' rules for Washington officials as reflected in his memoirs:

"... don't place too much faith in strategy documents produced by the bureaucracy. "I don't recall ever reading the president's National Security Strategy when preparing to become secretary of defense. Nor did I read any of the previous National Defense Strategy documents when I became secretary. I never felt disadvantaged by not having read these scriptures." (Tom: That said, I do wonder whether such documents are perhaps useful as guidance to subordinate officials? But obviously not very much if the SecDef doesn't know or care what they say.)"

US Is Not Truly Liberated

From Dirk Beauregarde's piece on the latest French news:

"However when François Hollande set up home at the presidential palace with his girlfriend, no one said anything. No one seemed to mind an unmarried head of state. No one seemed to care that the unofficial first lady had her own office, staff and security guards all paid for by the taxpayer. Can you imagine this happening in America?"

No, I can't.  We're still a bit puritan I guess.

Those Rich Farmers--Some Aren't

The least wealthy member of Congress:

"On the opposite side of the spectrum is Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., the least wealthy member of Congress. He had an average net worth of negative $12.1 million in 2012, due to loans for his family's dairy farm."

He's in partnership with his brothers.  I'm not sure how the net worth works, though.  Surely any commercial lender would ensure the partnership had assets to balance the loans--like $13 million worth of cows and barns and milking equipment and land?  So he might have a zero net worth, but not negative?  Something's going on here that's not explained.

Farm Exports Include Pregnant Cows

From James Fallows on Eastport, ME:

"The city has been lobbying hard for state and federal help in restoring the rail link that connected Eastport with the Maine Central Railroad until it was abandoned in 1978. But even without a rail connection, it has steadily increased its shipments by sea. One of its specialties is container ships full of (live) pregnant cows, bound for Turkey.
Pregnant cows? European beef and dairy herds, reduced by mad cow disease and other factors, are now being rebuilt, largely with American stock. When cows make the sea voyage while pregnant, their calves can be born on European soil and have the advantages of native-born treatment. To put it in American terms, the mother cows would not be eligible to run for president, but the calves would. A company called Sexing Technologies, based in Navasota, Texas, has devised a sperm-sorting system to ensure that nearly all those calves will be female, a plus for dairy herds. Chris Gardner convinced Sexing Technologies that Eastport would be an ideal transit point, and since 2010 some 40,000 cattle have been loaded aboard ships there."

Now if I could only stand the winters, Fallows makes it sound inviting.

Polar Vortex and the White House Garden

Today's Post had a garden column in which the writer bemoaned the fate of his fall-planted fava beans, but was glad he hadn't built a hoop house because the recent cold weather would have been too severe anyway.  Caused me to wonder how the White House garden survived the cold.  In past years Obamafoodorama has noted the hoop houses surviving snow, but the cold might have been too much.

On a personal note, my wife harvested the last fall-planted (transplanted) kohlrabi just before the single digit weather.  Still good.

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.