New Yorker on GMO and the State of Agriculture

Here's last week's New Yorker article on GMO's and Dr. Vendana Shiva.  While it's a good takedown of some of her positions I do have a couple quibbles with the writer's understanding of modern agriculture:

• "For most of the past ten thousand years, feeding more people simply meant farming more land. That option no longer exists; nearly every arable patch of ground has been cultivated, and irrigation for agriculture already consumes seventy per cent of the Earth’s freshwater."

I won't quarrel with the water point, but there's a lot of land which once was farmed and no longer is. (About 20 acres of the former Harshaw farm, for one.)  Much of the land once farmed in the Northeast has now reverted to forest or brush.  I can't find the set of maps demonstrating this fact so you'll have to take my word for it.  After the USSR broke up, a lot of farmland was abandoned.  Here's a quote from the abstract of a scholarly article:

'"The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to widespread abandonment of agricultural lands, but the extent and spatial patterns of abandonment are unclear. We quantified the extent of abandoned farmland, both croplands and pastures, across the region using MODIS NDVI satellite image time series from 2004 to 2006 and support vector machine classifications. Abandoned farmland was widespread, totaling 52.5 Mha, particularly in temperate European Russia (32 Mha), northern and western Ukraine, and Belarus. Differences in abandonment rates among countries were striking, suggesting that institutional and socio-economic factors were more important in determining the amount of abandonment than biophysical conditions. Indeed, much abandoned farmland occurred in areas without major constraints for agriculture"

Granted the fact that land was abandoned probably means it's less productive than that which is still cultivated, but the right prices will bring it back into production.

• The only commercial farmers in the United States without crop insurance are those who have a philosophical objection to government support.  

The statement may be true for production agriculture of field crops, but I don't believe it's true for other crops, nor for organic farmers.

A Different Time: October 29, 1869 NY Times

Happened to run a query on the NYTimes archive (firewall) which resulted in the Oct. 29, 1869 issue being retrieved.  Some the stories, all from the first page:

• a steamer, the Stonewall, took fire and burned near Carbondate--222 lives lost.
• the Dublin Fenian Amnesty Association met and criticize PM Gladstone's decision not to release Fenian prisoners.
• short piece on President Grant and the gold speculation
• blurb on France--the Press not to be prosecuted for violations of Press law
• Austrian government censures Prince Metternich for being connected to a duel
• fires in Scranton (coal breaker), Bath, NY (flour mill) Marion IN (factory) burned.
• report on a schism in the Mormon church
• summary of crop report from USDA, "importance of draining and thorough culture"
• woman's suffrage convention in Hartford
• two ships sunk on the Great Lakes
• a report on the movements of President Grant
• WV elections
• report on affairs and movements of various bureaucrats and government affairs
• report on the salaries and expenses of our ministers (ambassadors) abroad, down to the penny.
• meeting of "colored citizens" sending delegates to the National Labor Convention
• telegrapher's strik
• letter to the Secretary of Treasury on taxes and tariffs

The last item covers close to two columns on the front page.  It includes this statement:  "A Cure for Extravagance-- Every member of Congress and SEanator looks upon the public offices of his district as his own especial patronage, and gets appointed thereto, not those who by mental and moral acquirements are fitted for the office, but those whose appointment would be most likely to advance his own interest."

Hard Work or Luck: the 17 Billon Dollar Question

We liberals have always suspected that the rich just luck into their wealth, but now we have proof due to the divorce proceedings of billionaire Harold Hamm, as reported here by NBCNews.  Seems that if he can prove his money is just the result of luck, his wife gets zilch; if it's the result of his skill and effort, she gets a share.  So he's instructed his lawyers to say he was a lucky SOB, just like all of the rich.  So Texans may "remember the Alamo" but liberals will say "remember the Hamm".

Three Mistakes You Make

Found this quote in an old NoahSmith post:

There are three common mistakes that many Westerners make when observing or analyzing Japanese culture. First, they essentialize it - they assume there are some core things that never change, and that you can understand these things by studying samurai culture, or stuff like that. Second, they exoticize it - they assume that Japanese culture is very different from Western culture, and that there are deep secrets that only Japanese people themselves understand. Third, they homogenize it - they assume that the difference between Japanese individuals or subcultures is much smaller than the group difference between Japan and other cultures.

Seems to me we often make the same sort of mistakes in analyzing many things we don't  have first hand knowledge of:

• bureaucracy: bureaucrats are essentially [something--lazy, overpaid, not interested in the job, stupid, disinterested specialists, etc.]; Washington bureaucrats are not people like you and me, but a strange breed; bureaucrats and entrepreneurs are entirely different breeds.
• [do it yourself--apply the three mistakes to: blacks, whites, gays, professional athletes, weathermen, farmers, ...--see if the formula doesn't work for them]

Farmers Don't Make Money and Blue Jeans

Ben Smith  had a piece in the NYTimes recently complaining that farmers, specifically small food movement type farmers, can't make money.  He points back to past farmer organizations and  writes:

But none of these demands will be met until we start our own organizations — as in generations past — and shape a vision of a new food economy that ensures that growing good food also means making a good living.

He never deals with the idea that the Grange, the Populists, the National Farmers Union, the American Agriculture Movement, the various cooperatives weren't able to mold the environment to make the country safe for the sort of small family farmer he wants to preserve. 

I may have made this comparison before, but I forget.  :-(  Anyway, in my youth you could buy blue jeans from Sears or Montgomery Ward or buy Levis or Lees from department stores.  That was about it.  Blue jeans were associated, in my mind at least, with sailors coming back from active duty.  (Farmers wore overalls.)  Today you can still buy Lees, Levis, and Sears blue jeans, but also Lands End and LLBean and Carhart and Kmart and so on for many more brands, and that's not getting into the absurdly priced "fashion" blue jeans which go in and out of popularity. And at least the cheaper jeans are cheaper than when I grew up.  That variety is the result of our wealth as a country: we spend on food maybe a third or fourth of what we did when I was a kid, and incomes are much higher; therefore we can afford to indulge our tastes.

I see the same thing happening with food: a mixture of  fast cheap food, better tasting and often better food (even McDonalds food is better tasting and cheaper than the overcooked pot roast my mother made) along with a much greater choice and a much bigger price range.  I don't know what the best restaurants in New York City charged for a meal in 1950, but I'm sure it's gone up many times more than a basic diner meal has.

The Foodies and Their Myths

Nathaniel Johnson at Grist ties in a New Yorker piece on Vandana Shiva to talk about her big ideas, which he likes, and her analysis of the details, which he doesn't:

Romantic environmentalists tend to get the big-picture problems right, while fudging the details. Rationalists nail the details, but sometimes become so immersed in the minutiae that they lose sight of the big picture.

I don't agree with Johnson on the total big picture, but I greatly respect his willingness to look at the holes in some foodie arguments.

A more ascerbic person might consider "fudging" to be the same as "lying", but today I'm feeling generous, and willing to admit all parties have their myths: liberals, conservatives, foodies, production ag.

Pizzly Bears

A new term to me, but not to biologists who study hybrids.  A very interesting article in the NYTimes magazine.

EU Agriculture Policy

I've lost track of what's been happening in the EU farm programs over the last few years.  Here's a BBC piece of about a year ago.  

Some highlights:

• cost about $80 billion for direction farm payments and rural development
• direct payments to farmers in central and east Europe countries being phased in (those countries much more dependent on agriculture) but farmers in the old EU countries get most benefits
• fights over environmental incentives and payment limitations
• enjoyed this: "The definition of an "active farmer" has also been contentious. The current payments system is largely based on land area and past subsidy levels, meaning that landowners like airports and sports clubs, which do not farm, have been getting subsidies based on their grasslands or other eligible land areas."
• big farmers get most benefits

The Great Sharon Astyk on Reading to Kids

Several years ago I found Ms Astyk's Casaubon's Book blog, which then was devoted to the food movement, locavores, peak oil, etc.  I mostly disagreed with her views, but she wrote very well so it was worth following her RSS feed.  She and her husband live on a small farm in upstate New York where he's a professor and she's a writer/lecturer and, for some years now, a foster mother.  She has several sons of her own and an amazing procession of foster kids, all of which has made her blogging very very sporadic, and perhaps eliminated her writing and speaking.

Her occasional posts on the foster parenting experience are good, and particularly interesting as she meditates on the effects of class and culture. Her last post is  a long essay on reading to kids.  I strongly recommend it.

From Seeds to Tanks, the History of Government Giving

Lots of publicity these days about the government giving surplus military arms and money to buy equipment to the nation's police forces.  It reminds me of the good old days, back when Congressmen gave out seeds--no I wasn't alive then but those gifts are credited as the seeds (pun intended) which grew into the USDA.

Much the same political dynamic may be going on today.  The public always asks its government: "what have you done for me lately" and it's nice for Congresspeople to be able to point with pride to their gifts.  Used to be that they pointed to "pork", once they distributed seeds, in the 21st century they can point to shiny objects from DOD or money from TSA.  All part of GWOT.