Nice Paragraph: Fargo II

"Maybe the FX series Fargo is so good because blood looks so beautiful on snow. Red splashes against white, soaking into it, marking something that was once pure with a sudden, swift reminder of violence."

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/13/9512365/fargo-season-2-premiere-recap

How To Change Peoples' Minds: Tax or Nag

Always interested in how people change their minds, if they do.  Two bits of evidence:

1. Taxes work.  From NYTimes, Mexico levied a tax assessed on bottlers of soft drinks. The higher price reduced consumption.
2. Nagging works. NY Times article on  how Californians nag each other about water consumption.

Are Federal Employees Properly Compensated

This piece answers: "no one knows".

I agree. 

CRISPR and the Future of Genetic Modification

CRISPR is enabling a lot of "progress".  A quote from a Technology Review piece, predicting CRISPR-ized seeds being available by the end of the decade:

Gutterson said the objectives of plant labs include engineering resistance to blights or to low rainfall by rapidly introducing beneficial gene variants found in other varieties of the same species. Using conventional breeding to move traits can take many years. “It takes a lot of time and is not as precise as we would like,” says Gutterson. “We could very much short-cut that.”

The key question is the attitude that the public and regulators will take to these plants.

Companies hope gene-edited crops could be largely exempted from regulation. Already, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has told several companies that it will not regulate these plants because they don’t contain genes from other species. However, it’s unclear how the European Union or China will approach plants made with the new methods.

As I've been saying, it's going to be hard to reject such plants.

Making Hay the New Way

My time on the farm spanned the loose hay era and the "square" bale era.

This piece on New Holland Haymakers is interesting, a very new world.  The idea of chopping hay down to 3 inches, both for the cows and to make the bale more dense to save freight costs? And I'm surprised by the relatively low cost.  I wonder if round bale balers are simpler than the old square balers, seems as if they should be.

What Government Does For You

It simplifies your money.  Back in the good old days (i.e. pre-Civil War) you'd need to subscribe to a newspaper just to keep track of what banks are issuing bank notes (paper currency) and what forgeries are circulating.

Population Projections

I've been assuming the world wasn't in too much trouble population-wise, because the birth rate was rapidly lowering almost everywhere.  But that's wrong, I mean the lower birth rate is right, but what I missed was the lower death rate.  This Technology Review graph shows the result.

While the news is depressing for concerns about resources, farming, etc., it is good news for the longevity of children, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Congratulations to Walter Jeffries and Family

They got state approval to operate their butcher shop today, 7 years in the making.

[Update: see the article on the history of their efforts here, informative even for someone who's followed the blog for a number of years.]

When Is a Farm a Farm? II

Illinois extension has a post on the FDA definition of a "farm".

To quote: "The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).... directs the FDA to implement comprehensive, prevention-based controls throughout the food supply chain...."  (Think of mad-cow concerns, as well as listeria and similar food-borne diseases.)

Without quoting the whole thing, the issues seem to be two-fold: when a "farm" also includes food preparation, and when a "farm" also includes preparing feed for animals.   There's still more regulations to come, particularly on the human food chain.   (As in my previous posts on farm constitution, the purpose of the federal program governs the definition of the farm--there is no platonic ideal of a "farm".)

FDA is setting up training: "The three Alliances—Produce Safety Alliance (PSA), Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance (FSPCA), and Sprout Safety Alliance (SSA) — are developing Train-the-Trainer programs to ensure that lead trainers are familiar with, and prepared to deliver, the curricula and that they understand the requirements of the FSMA rules."  (from the FDA site linked to from the ILext post.)

Al Kamen and the Post

Al Kamen was the Federal Page man for the Washington Post.  He's retiring today, but presumably the page continues.  Before him the Post had a page devoted to the federal government for a number of years, maybe as long as I've been reading it. (There currently is a separate column on federal employee matters.)