Farming and Consolidation, Continued

Yesterday's post included an argument that technology would not help smaller farmers compete in producing generic commodities.  As a followup, this from an Amber Waves article:

Production has shifted to larger farms in most agricultural commodity sectors over the last two decades. This consolidation has contributed to productivity growth in agriculture, leading to lower commodity and food prices and reducing total resource use in food and fiber production. As consolidation reduces the farm population, it also makes starting small and mid-sized farming operations more difficult. This is especially true for dairy farms, where a major transformation of the sector has reduced the number of dairy farms by nearly 60 percent over the past 20 years, even as total milk production increased by one-third. Recent results from the Census of Agriculture and the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) detail how and why the structure of dairy production has changed.

The "midpoint" herd size is now at 900 cows.

Farming and IT (and a Very Bad Headline)

The NYTimes has an article today on the topic of information technology and farming, focusing on an Indiana farmer, Kip Tom, who handles 20,000 acres, up from 700 acres in the 1970's. The article is not bad, hitting the big data involved in precision farming, the use of drones, the rising status of women, etc. etc.  It includes a quote from a former farmer who now is one of the 25 employees of the Tom operation, which includes 6 Tom family members.

It's titled: "Working the Land and the Data, Technology Offers Some Family Owned Farms a Chance To Thrive and Compete With Giant Agribusinesses".  While the headline is fine, the subhead is worst one I can remember in a good while.  It's based on this sentence in the article, a line which is undermined by the rest of the article: "It [technology] is also helping them grow to compete with giant agribusinesses].  The truth, more clear in the accompanying video, is that by going heavily into technology, and being smart enough to pick up land in the 1980's, when values had crashed, the Tom family were able to expand and thrive, when their neighbors went broke and sold their own operations.

Consider just the data in the article: the 20,000 acres of the current operation represents the equivalent of 28 farms in the 700 acre range from the 1970's.  And those 700 acre farms in themselves probably represented several smaller farms from the era of horsepower (which Tom's father remembers his father plowing with). Leesburg, IN, by the way, has lost about 10 percent of its population since 2000.

At the risk of over-analyzing, I suspect the writer was impressed with Mr. Tom, considered him one of the good guys.  Logically then, if he's a good guy, he must be competing with bigger operations, those soulless agribusinesses.  A good guy can't be someone who succeeds by driving others out of business.  Yes, "succeeds by driving...." is harsh, and not the way we usually think about individuals.  Because of the invisible hand of the market, it's not any one individual/enterprise bankrupting others, it's just the way things are; some people win and some people don't. 

Memory and Reality

Saw somewhere a description of a study of how well Americans remember their Presidents.  The bottom line was that we remembered the first 4, Lincoln/Johnson/Grant; FDR and not the ones in between.  The explanation was that memory is refreshed by usage--if we don't have occasion to recal Polk, we won't remember him.

That makes sense I guess, but there's also another phenomenon going on; the accumulation of true and not so true memories around certain figures.  It's something of a geological provision, some figures are built up and some torn down.

As it happens, there seems to me to be an example in A.O. Scott's review today of the new biopic on Alan Turing.  Turing is a figure who is becoming more and more prominent, partially for good reasons--his contributions to the theory of computing and to British code-breaking in WWII--and partially for understandable reasons: his homosexuality and tragic fate.  But IMHO he's getting props which are undeserved as well.  Scott writes:

" There are lines of dialogue that sound either anachronistic or — it may amount to the same thing — prophetic. It is thrilling and strange to hear the words “digital computer” uttered a half-century before any such thing existed,.... [emphasis added]

This puts him 50 years ahead of the game which isn't true.  The first mention of "digital computer" in Google ngrams is in 1940, which  is roughly when the first digital computers were being built, perhaps 4 years after Turing's big publication. There's controversy over the definitions here, but the bottomline is several people were working in the field.  But 100 years from now Turing will be remembered as the inventor of the computer just as Edison is remembered as the inventor of the light bulb.

Population Growth Versus Food Growth

According to wikipedia the average rate of growth of world population is 1.1 percent annually.  According to this farmdoc post the big US food crops have increased yield by 1.2 percent (wheat) to 2.0 percent (corn) and 2.4 percent (peanuts) over the last 40+ years.

Persnickety Grump Today

A Ph.D. does not know the difference between "cache" and "cachet":

"that Ph.D. cache..."  from a blog post on Ferguson.

Is Crop Insurance Too Inefficient?

Someone called the Landstewardship Project (seems to be based in MN/WI) put out a study attacking crop insurance as highly subsidized and highly profitable.  According to today's Farm Policy, the crop insurance industry responded by saying the figures in the report end 5 years ago, before a set of administrative changes by USDA and legislative changes in the farm bill which cut subsidies and costs.

See the article at Agriculture.com

Does Our Racism Extend to Pets?

The Fairfax Animal Shelter needs special incentives to get black pets adopted.

McArdle on Barry

Megan McArdle has a good post on Marion Barry, a post to which I made this comment:

Fascinating--a relative, a WASP living outside Boston in the 40-70's time frame, amazed me as a boy with his violent opinions against Catholics and mayor Curley, while I grew up to become one of the white liberals who helped elect Barry to the school board before leaving DC for the burbs.

Maybe the Chinese proverb should read: "may you have interesting politicians"

Comments

I've been remiss in paying attention to the structure and settings of this blog, meaning comments have been disfunctional for a good while.  Hopefully I've fixed that.

Bureaucrats Get Some Attention

Politico has an article on the challenge facing the USCIS bureaucrats who have to implement President Obama's executive order on immigration.  It's divided between emphasizing the size of the challenge (4 million applications) and the lessons learned from handling Obama's 2012 order for the "Dreamers") which was about a tenth of the size.

One thing Politico doesn't mention that Vox has a piece  which mentions the role of intermediaries, those who claim to be able to get people what they want from an impenetrable federal bureaucracy.  There's some evidence that 40 percent of the immigration "experts" are con-people.

The holy grail for bureaucrats is to design and implement a process which works the first time, which handles almost all the situations, and which doesn't require intermediaries.  It's a dream, not a reality.