Cyber security for Farmers?

FBI says farmers vulnerable to hacking of digitized data. 

I'm not sure what the motivation would be.  The piece discusses the possible theft of bulk data for use in market manipulation and such.  That's possible I suppose, perhaps particularly at the state and corporation level, but I'd think it unlikely.  What other motivation: ransom, as has happened with hospitals.  I don't think farm-level data is that crucial or time sensitive. 

I know the ag lobby has put in legal provisions requiring FSA to keep secret some data, but that's more anti-EWG measures than anything else.

Call me cynical, but the cyber-security/industrial complex has an interest in alarming everyone they can, so they can sell their services. 

Cover Crops

I feels as if I've mentioned this before, but anyway.

Tamar Haspel has an article in the Post on changes in "big ag", which affect the environment, such as "no-till". She focuses on cover crops, noting that sometimes they pay off financially, but often they don't. Also, farmers who rent are less motivated to use cover crops on the rented ground.

I'll quote my comment:

"Once upon a time, there was a program called the Agricultural Conservation Program. It included cost sharing for various conservation practices, including winter cover crops. Then into this idyllic picture came a President, elected by the people. This President refused to spend the money Congress appropriated for the program, thinking it was a waste of money. After much toing and froing, and a few lawsuits IIRC, Congress and the President compromise by calling the program a new name and by killing some of the conservation practices, including the cover crop practice." 

The toing and froing was partly over whether the President had the authority not to spend the money.  IIRC the Supreme Court eventually said no.

The President was Nixon.

Personal Note

In 75 years I can't ever remember seeing another person's genitalia in a bathroom, nor do I think anyone has seen mine.

Monarchs: Planting Milkweed Isn't the Answer?

We Americans like the simple technological solutions to problems.  (We American analysts like to over-generalize.)

Recently people have been planting milkweed to help the endangered monarch butterfly.

Now comes a report (from my alma mater) which says it's not so simple. Looks like the true causes are going to be harder to fix: lack of nectar in fall, weather, fragmentation of habitat.  Can't see a Kickstarter campaign developing around these.

[Hat tip: Tamar Haspel retweet of Brad Plumer.]

Influence of the Past

The Post had  a piece the other day on a school in Alabama with only an aged T-1 line to support their Internet usage.  Upgrading is complicated because two different companies provide service in the area and a river isolates the school.

A Vox report on how Amazon's same-day service  reflects past discrimination.  Its availability is based on the number of Prime customers in an area, which in turn reflects past housing patterns.

These are instances of how the past weighs on the present, or how "them that has gets". 

A Problem of the Small Diverse Farmer

One of the boasts of a farmer is she is a jack [jill?] of all trades.I've seen this a number of times over the years; even used it myself in writing about my father.  It's true enough: being a successful farmer requires a broad spectrum of skills. What's often not considered though is the difficulty a small diverse farmer has.  This thought was triggered by this post on learning to be a stockman.  It's from a blog I just discovered, the Foothill Agrarian blog (mostly sheep), a farmer in California.

He's relatively specialized, compared to some.  The accumulation of knowledge from academic research and the more efficient sharing of knowledge means there's more and more to learn.  It's one of the ways in which the market economy leads to greater specialization.  Not only can a larger more specialized operation cut costs, but the operator can learn more and put it to use more effectively.

There are still people like Walt Jeffries of Sugar Mountain Farm who are able to combine many skills and out-compete the rest.

Walking the Nation and Trolling Comments

NYTimes has a piece today by a guy who walked the route of the Keystone pipeline, which turns out to be the hook for a proposal that people should be able to walk where they please, as they can in the UK and other nations.

I suspect in the UK an etiquette has developed over the years (centuries?) for walking, an etiquette which we would lack in the US.  An etiquette which might include:

• no trash
• no feeding the animals, domestic or wild
• no scaring the animals
• avoid the bulls
• no trash 

 Anytime you open a new frontier, it takes a while for etiquette/manners to develop for it.  That was true when railroads were invented, it would be true for national walking.

Driverless Cars Revisited

Vox describes the detailed mapping Google and others will have to do to support their autonomous cars. And Brad Plumer describes five challenges: mapping; social interactions between car and other people; bad weather; regulations; cybersecurity.

These innovations seem to be coming from different directions: cars which drive themselves on preregistered courses (there was a piece on an outfit in the Netherlands which produces upscale gold carts for such applications); cars with improvements, like today's safety stuff; cars which are as independent of outside help as the old model of human driving car (the Tesla model).  It's partly the old question, which is better distributed intelligence or central guidance.  We shall see.

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."