For those who watch Downton Abbey, the Post had a piece on its economics yesterday.
It's all good, but I've a couple concerns. Apparently the estate includes several thousand acres of land which are farmed either by tenants or by the estate. This season a long-time tenant died and Mary and Tom were going to take over the farm, since the tenant was in arrears on his rent. The Earl responded to the tenant's son's appeal that the son take over the farm, and loaned him money to pay the arrears.
From this episode, one assumes that when the estate farms the land, it has either sharecroppers or wage laborers doing the work. Not sure that's right though. I'm mentally comparing the picture with the post-bellum South, with its mixture of cash tenants, share tenants, and day laborers. Not sure how it corresponds or if it does. To the extent the estate wants to take over the land, it's assuming a bigger risk from weather and market factors. Weather in England may be less extreme than in the US, and I don't know what the market for wheat is doing post-war.
Continuing on farming, back during WWI Lady Sybil learned to drive a tractor being used on one of the farms. I'm not sure the context: whether it was the tractor of an independent farmer, one owned by a tenant, or one owned by the estate. At any rate, expenditures for capital investment like tractors were a big hurdle for tenants, so I wonder about the financing of the tractor. (I suspect Fellowes threw in the tractor just for dramatic purposes, without intending any economic analysis. But then, that may be true of the whole series.)
Monday, February 10, 2014
Sunday, February 09, 2014
The Olympics, Past and Present
A relative is into the Olympics, describing his family's trips to see them on his blog, although this year they're staying at home and he's watching 94 hours of Olympic coverage every day. (My relatives are gifted.) Their trips begin with the Nagano games of 1998, through Torino of 2006, Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010, and London 2012. The earliest descriptions are in the form of a diary, in a Word doc, but which now are available through his blog. He's a good photographer, so includes nice photos. He also collects Olympic pins, which forms a theme throughout the series.
Friday, February 07, 2014
End of an Era
This notice announces the replacement of FSA fax machines by an Internet based fax solution.
When I joined ASCS there were two methods of getting instructions to the field fast: the printed notice, which typically would take 2-3 days to get printed, put in the pouch mail for the state office, and be received by the state office. The state office could modify the notice, print copies for the counties, and mail them out. So we probably figured on 3-5 business days for material to hit the county office, and that was with everything working smoothly.
The other method was the "wire notice", ideally a page or two, because it would be taken to the Department's teletype office and typed on the teletype for wiring to the state offices. This cut the time to 2-4 hours, but the state office still had to retype the incoming copy, print, and mail to county offices. (The text was in all caps, which has left me with a confirmed prejudice against all caps in any form.)
So in the early 70's the Records and Communications Branch of the Administrative Services Division got into facsimile machines. Rather quickly as I remember it they got the money to install fax machines in each state office and we moved the "wire notices" over to the fax machines. It took a long while for the Department's teletype center to be closed down: AMS did their market news through there, they put new releases "out on the wire" (and those were still the days when a news release could move commodity prices), and selected people with homeland security responsibilities (as we'd call them today, then they were "defense" responsibilities) got copies of State Department cables, both the FAS stuff and other traffic.
So the fax machine has had its run of about 30 years, being replaced by a software package. RIP fax machines.
When I joined ASCS there were two methods of getting instructions to the field fast: the printed notice, which typically would take 2-3 days to get printed, put in the pouch mail for the state office, and be received by the state office. The state office could modify the notice, print copies for the counties, and mail them out. So we probably figured on 3-5 business days for material to hit the county office, and that was with everything working smoothly.
The other method was the "wire notice", ideally a page or two, because it would be taken to the Department's teletype office and typed on the teletype for wiring to the state offices. This cut the time to 2-4 hours, but the state office still had to retype the incoming copy, print, and mail to county offices. (The text was in all caps, which has left me with a confirmed prejudice against all caps in any form.)
So in the early 70's the Records and Communications Branch of the Administrative Services Division got into facsimile machines. Rather quickly as I remember it they got the money to install fax machines in each state office and we moved the "wire notices" over to the fax machines. It took a long while for the Department's teletype center to be closed down: AMS did their market news through there, they put new releases "out on the wire" (and those were still the days when a news release could move commodity prices), and selected people with homeland security responsibilities (as we'd call them today, then they were "defense" responsibilities) got copies of State Department cables, both the FAS stuff and other traffic.
So the fax machine has had its run of about 30 years, being replaced by a software package. RIP fax machines.
Thursday, February 06, 2014
Most Rural STudents
It turns out that the state where I was born, New York, ranks 8th in the nation for number of rural students. The link (hat tip I think the Rural Blog) is to an interactive map of the country which shows lots of data on rural education. (Texas is first in number of rural students.)
How We Blind Ourselves: Twins Born in Different Years
Freakonomics has a post laying out the odds of twins being born in different years. Mildly interesting, until you get to the end. These are well-educated bright people, who would like to come up with a counter-intuitive result. I could describe myself that way.:-(
Acreage Reporting for Organic Farming
Just a stray thought: has the acreage reporting system been changed to recognize organically grown crops and the GIS system to recognize organic ground?
Wednesday, February 05, 2014
The Shocking News from DC
Senator McCain as quoted in Farm Policy commenting on the farm bill:
“This is all part of Farm Bill politics. In order to pass a Farm Bill, Congress must find a way to appease every special interest of every commodity association from asparagus farmers to wheat growers. If you cut somebody’s subsidy, you give them a grant. If you kill their grant, then you subsidize their crop insurance.”It's all part of Congress being able to point with pride at goodies provided and with alarm at goodies taken away.
Monday, February 03, 2014
B*S*: What Languages Have the Term
Ran across this, based on a link from John Phipps:
As it happens, I know the French equivalent for s*** is "merde". And Google Translate says the French have two words for b*s* : conneries and foutaise. gives a Japanese term for it. But Translate uses the English term for a number of languages--not sure whether that's just a default or whether Armenian has, in fact, imported b*s* as its own term.I've noticed an interesting thing about bullshit: There's no word for it in Japanese. Just as some Japanese words (like 適当) can't be translated without a long and complicated explanation, a proper understanding of "bullshit" typically occupies an entire dinner party in Japan. Observing this fact, I came up with my theory of what makes (or made) Western Civilization unique.
Saturday, February 01, 2014
Payment Limitation--Paper Entities
A recent case:
Read more: http://www.sj-r.com/article/20140130/NEWS/140139902#ixzz2s5rq0FYo
The owners of a central Illinois farming business that will pay $5.3 million to settle allegations it faked partnerships to avoid limits on subsidies say they did nothing wrong.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday said Dowson Farms of Divernon agreed to the settlement. The department accused three of the owners of creating fake partnerships in the names of employees between 2002 and 2008 to bypass caps on subsidies. The three didn’t admit any wrongdoing.
Read more: http://www.sj-r.com/article/20140130/NEWS/140139902#ixzz2s5rq0FYo
Where Do Farmers Come From?
Seems to me that the conventional wisdom is that farmers inherit, that the son (almost always the son) inherits the farm and that's where farmers come from. I say "conventional wisdom" although I really mean the presumption in history. Once it was true, of course. If 90-95 percent of the population is farmers, as in colonial America, then inheritance is the logical answer.
The economists had the concept of the "agricultural ladder", where a man worked his way up from day labor to sharecropper to renter to owner. That may have worked in the 19th century, but I think maybe its prevalence is overestimated. In the case of my family, my paternal great grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my father all moved onto farms aided by money from other occupations or sources (preaching, carpentry, and family, respectively). That's a small sample but it's easy for historians to overlook, because there's no statistics to prove or disprove this.
Today it seems that there's a reasonable flow of people from other occupations into agriculture, particularly the "food movement" end of agriculture: the organic farmers, the community-supported agriculture, the niche products of wine, goat cheese, semi-exotic crops.
This interview with an organic farmer in Grist is interesting, covering many aspects of modern food movement farming. Implicitly it's directed towards people coming to farming, not inheriting farming. There was also a recent article in the NYTimes on the graying of the organic movement, which made the point that children of some people who came to organic in the 60's and 70's had no interest in continuing on their parents path.
The economists had the concept of the "agricultural ladder", where a man worked his way up from day labor to sharecropper to renter to owner. That may have worked in the 19th century, but I think maybe its prevalence is overestimated. In the case of my family, my paternal great grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my father all moved onto farms aided by money from other occupations or sources (preaching, carpentry, and family, respectively). That's a small sample but it's easy for historians to overlook, because there's no statistics to prove or disprove this.
Today it seems that there's a reasonable flow of people from other occupations into agriculture, particularly the "food movement" end of agriculture: the organic farmers, the community-supported agriculture, the niche products of wine, goat cheese, semi-exotic crops.
This interview with an organic farmer in Grist is interesting, covering many aspects of modern food movement farming. Implicitly it's directed towards people coming to farming, not inheriting farming. There was also a recent article in the NYTimes on the graying of the organic movement, which made the point that children of some people who came to organic in the 60's and 70's had no interest in continuing on their parents path.
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