Locavores Need Wool Suits?

A post here from USDA on the use of sheep to reduce tillage in an organic farming setup.  The idea seems to be to control weeds by grazing sheep on land for a year between row crops.

My comment is, as with other organic rotations like using alfalfa in a rotation, it's fine if you have a market/use for the product.  Sheep herds have declined over the decades as we turned away from wool suits and mutton.  The knitters of the world can absorb only so much wool from small sheep farms (which doesn't mean the prices of skeins of yarn are low). In the old days of horses and dairy grazing you had use for fields of grass; in the days of tractors and barn-housed cows you don't.

Farming like most any human industry is more complex than it looks from the outside.

Coitus Interruptus

Five-thirty-eight has a post on the always interesting subject of penises (actually "wieners" in their terminology), which includes this:

"That’s partly because it’s difficult to study how male and female genitalia interact during sex. For example, Kelly told me that, in order to study fruit flies, scientists drop mating pairs into liquid nitrogen to freeze them mid-flagrante."

Dairy, Grandin and NPR

I seen Prof. Grandin a number of times, including the biopic of her life. I respect the work she's done on animal welfare.  I don't listen much to public radio, using WETA mostly as background, but we're probably generally in tune.  So I'm surprised to find myself generally opposing their take on dairy cows.  Yes, our cows were good producers and probably averaged 12,000 lbs a year.  These days average production is 22,000 lbs.

This Post article quotes these two paragraphs from NPR:

"Since dairy cows were first brought to the United States, their owners have been trying to coax more and more milk out of them. They've done that through dairy parlor design, barn layout, feed rations, milk scheduling and hormone treatments.

Now the focus is on genetics: Cows are being bred to be larger, hungrier, and more productive. But this drive to raise ever-larger, hulking Holsteins has some prominent livestock advocates ringing alarm bells."

That's misleading, if not wrong. Farmers have been breeding cows for greater milk production ever since humans domesticated them.  That's what we do, not only with cows but all our grains, fruits, and vegetables. We had registered Holsteins on the farm, meaning we submitted pictures or drawings of each cow added to the herd to the central registry, along with data on their dam and sire.  When the inseminator came, he and dad consulted over which bull to choose (he carried vials of semen from 3 or 4 bulls with him). That was one of the big advantages of artificial insemination, the choice of bulls, by looking at the production of the bull's offspring.  

Since the Derby is coming along, I can't resist noting that similar efforts have been going on in racing for years, probably earlier than dairy because the potential payout for a great foal is so much greater than a great calf.

So the reality is: breeding has always been there. In the last half of the twentieth century we also started to pay attention to dairy rations,barn/parlor design, etc. Grandin would know this, so the writer has misled by using NPR to lead into her position, which is "[good dairymen] raise smaller cows that tend to be healthier, as well as productive over a longer period, and opting to feed their herds grass as often as possible. The latter [bad dairymen], meanwhile, are driving up the efficiency numbers you see in the chart above, selecting for cows that tend to suffer from a number of adverse health outcomes."

Here I feel only qualified to say:if dairymen have overbred, it's little different than turkey growers raising turkeys which can't reproduce because their breasts are too big or Great Dane breeders raising dogs doomed to hip displasia.

How White Polar Bears Stay Warm

We all know that white reflects the sun's rays and black absorbs it, right?  So how do polar bears stay warm?

I don't guarantee the accuracy of this sentence from a Jstor daily on solar panel improvements:

Polar bears help stay warm using transparent fur (which appears white at a distance) that reflects light onto the bear’s heat-trapping black skin.

Robots in Everything

DOD has its first robot ship.

Farmers are building their own.

Tulips in Holland, Roses in Colombia, Peonies in Alaska?

Modern Farmer explains why growing peonies for export to the lower 48 is becoming big business in Alaska.

Biggest Defense Budgets

According to a Times piece on our Middle East policy, specifically Saudi Arabia:

1. United States
2. China
3. Saudi Arabia
4. Russia

Yglesias and Jacobin Are Both Wrong

Matt Yglesias tweeted that this paragraph in a Jacobin article attacking incremental liberalism is mostly right.

The simple truth is that virtually every significant and lasting progressive achievement of the past hundred years was achieved not by patient, responsible gradualism, but through brief flurries of bold action. The Second New Deal in 1935–36 and Civil Rights and the Great Society in 1964–65 are the outstanding examples, but the more ambiguous victories of the Obama era fit the pattern, too.

The writer is sly, setting himself up to deny the "significance" of any achievement which was achieved by "gradualism", with the  fallback position of "virtually". Incrementalism often works by getting a piece of the pie now, another in a few years, so the argument is weighted. And the examples suggest that only legislative achievements count.  Wrong again.

One hundred years goes back to 1916, so here goes:

• Nineteenth Amendment (women's suffrage) 1919
• Brown versus Board of Education 1954  (the greatest example of incremental progress by liberals)
• Twenty-Fourth Amendment (poll tax) 1962 (so long a battle the ultimate victory became meaningless)
• Americans with Disability Act 1990
• federal aid to education (a long battle beginning in the 1950's to establish the principle and expand the pot)
• Equal Rights Amendment (a battle in which liberals were defeated, but the victory is being won incrementally)
• gay rights.
• Medicare, Part D, and CHIPS.

 More time to think would yield more examples.

IMHO what's right is this: sometimes liberals/progressives win victories by slow and patient work; sometimes we win victories by a breakthrough, a popular movement.  And sometimes we "win" something history shows was the wrong way to go.  Does anyone remember the progressive cause: public power, building hydroelectric dams? 

[Updated: Kevin Drum seems to take a similar position here. ]

Counter-Clerks: What Scalia Got Right

A former law clerk for Justice Scalia writes about Scalia's "counter-clerks".  Usually each year he'd hire one of his four law clerks as a liberal, a devil's advocate whose mission was to keep his arguments honest.  Seems to me it's the sort of thing each Justice should have.  And not a bad thing for everyone.

George Washington Never Took a Bath? Not

In a tub, that is.  We have it on the authority of H.L. Mencken, who says Millard Fillmore was the first president to take a bath in a tub.  The tub, it seems, had just been invented.


Of course, Mencken later admitted the article was a complete hoax.