Conaway and the Farm Bill

Politico has a post on the discussions between Rep Conaway, House Ag head, and Rep. Black, House Budget head.

Sources with knowledge of the discussions say that the agriculture committee was initially facing around $70 billion in proposed cuts over the next decade, but Conaway's intervention kept the pullback to around $10 billion. That came after Black lowered her original goal for total mandatory spending cuts by roughly $300 billion, and Conaway persistently made the case that slashing programs under his watch would imperil the 2018 farm bill and, by extension, farmers, rural constituents and low-income Americans struggling to make ends meet.

The Importance of the Bureaucracy

Vox says the White House failed timely to book a Hamburg hotel.  Just a reminder that smooth operations depend on lots of people doing their bit, people called bureaucrats.  We don't know where the breakdown was.  I could imagine someone being turned off by Trump and not taking the initiative to remind the chain of command that booking a hotel was necessary.  I could imagine a vacancy in the usual chain of command for travel arrangements, perhaps a failure of liaison between the White House and State.  I could imagine a Trump appointee in the White House just not knowing, not having been informed, or forgetting to book a hotel, just because it's their first time and the Harshaw Rule is: Never do things right the first time.

Amish Organic Farmers and Steel-Wheeled Tractors

Washington Post has a good article on a group of Amish dairies in Iowa who are producing organic milk, but who are being undercut by what they view as illegitimate "organic milk" from large dairies.  This is a sequel to an earlier article where the Post challenged some large dairies, trying to prove by analysis of the milk and data on the operations that the cows could not be grazing as much as is required by USDA regs in order to be labeled "organic".

That's a valid challenge.  And the Amish seem eminently qualified to produce organic milk, given their religion-based resistance to technology.  It fits their "small" farms (under 100 cows, which still seems large to me).

I've followed the Amish story for a long while, ever since I served on a task force in the 1970's with the county executive director of the Lancaster County ASCS Office, who would describe the ins and outs of their relations with government programs.  Donald Kraybill has been a major source of my knowledge of the Amish, and the lines they draw of acceptable and unacceptable technology.  I still remember pictures of a horse-drawn baler.

This article was accompanied by a picture of a steel-wheeled tractor being used on an Amish farm, which would seem to show this group of Amish pushing out the boundaries of acceptable technology.  What's ironic to me is that horses fit nicely into organic agriculture--they can eat the oats which form part of an acceptable crop rotation.  The switch from horses to tractors in the Midwest from 1930 to 1955 also meant a loss of the market for oats.  So while the Amish have a valid complaint against large dairies on the one hand, on the other they're slowly acceding to the forces which undermined our organic agriculture of the 1930's.

Administrative Procedure Act Pros and Cons

EPA has run into an APA problem as interpreted by a court:

The ruling serves as a signal to Pruitt and other Trump administrations that delaying a rule's effective date may be viewed by courts as tantamount to revoking or amending a rule. In their ruling, Judges David Tatel and Robert Wilkins said that the agency could change the methane regulations but would need to create a new rule to undo the old one, and couldn't delay the effective date of the old law while seeking to rewrite it. 

Unless a higher court overrules, EPA must follow rulemaking procedures under APA to create the new rule, meaning a delay of months if not years.  As the Rural Blog notes, this is a problem because the Trump administration has used the same approach elsewhere as well.  But we liberals should not applaud too hardily; the strict application of APA could kill Obama's process for the children of undocumented immigrants (the "Dreamers").  And once liberals retake the presidency, we'll be stuck following the same process to revive those Obama rules which Trump's administration is eventually able to kill using the APA procedure

A Bubble Bursting--the Farm Economy?

It's probably been years since I posted about the possibility of an agricultural depression, like the 1980's.  Farm commodity prices have fallen and been low for several years, and the value of ag land has fallen as well.  In the 1980's those two factors meant those farmers who had overextended themselves in an effort to cash in on the 70's boom in prices started going bankrupt.  But not so this time, at least according to this article.

The factors at work:

1. farmers built up their net worth during the boom better than they did in the 70's
2. interest rates now are low, in the 80's high
3. lending on real estate was more rational 
4. better safety net due to more crop insurance coverage.

Not really qualified to question any of these, though I would observe no. 4 conflates insurance coverage for weather and coverage for economy.  We did have some bad years during the 80's weather-wise, but I don't recall much crop insurance coverage for economy.

I'd also observe there are a lot fewer farmers today than in the 80's, which IMHO reduces the likelihood of any one farmer going bust--there's fewer marginal players in the game. 

The Golden Rule, Cynic Version

The Post has an article today on development in Prince William county, interesting on several points. It seems that Loudoun County has 70+ data centers, Fairfax 43, and developers are working to put data centers in Prince William ("Prince Billy county" as my wife sometimes calls it) county, just south of Fairfax.

The cynical version of the Golden Rule is: them that has the gold, rules.  Which I take to mean there's a tendency for the wealthy and powerful to become more so, and also for the poor and weak to become more so.  The siting of data centers is an example: there's advantages to having your data center near  other centers--transferring data between them is faster when the distance is shorter.  (Michael Lewis has a book on the super-fast stock traders, who exploit micro-second difference in timing to make profits.) So the Virginia suburbs of DC were an early center for Internet cabling, which has led over time to the concentration of data centers.

There's another case for the cynical version in the article.  Indeed, the hook of the article is the plight of an Afro-American community near Haymarket, a community mostly of descendants from freed slaves who have owned land there and passed it on over the years.  But now progress is coming.

It's a complicated story--data centers require lots of electricity.  In this case there's a data center being constructed in one neighborhood and Dominion Power needs to run new transmission lines for several miles to supply the data center, using eminent domain when necessary to get the right of way for the lines.There are several logical routes to consider, but as the story says:

"Set in a remote area off Lee Highway, the Carver Road neighborhood became the chosen route by default, after other options were either deemed too costly or torpedoed by opposition from local homeowners associations."

The homeowner associations are, of course, wealthier and more influential than the African-American community.   The Golden Rule applies

Surprise of the Day: Cowen and Deerslayer

We didn't often get off the farm, except to go to town.  One time I particularly remember is a trip to Cooperstown, sometime in late summer after the hay was in the barn and before moving the old hens out and the pullets off the range into the henhouses.

Anyhow we visited the Baseball museum and the Farmer Museum--mom was particularly into the latter, much to my sister's disgust. Mom had grown up on a farm pre-WWI so all the tools brought back memories.  The museum is on the site of the old Cooper farm, so the store had some books on him.  I successfully argued to buy one, IIRC a child's biography of James Fenimore, perhaps my first book purchased in a store not a Christmas present.

My sister got into Cooper at some point, so I followed along.  I''m not sure whether I was reading her books, or from the school library, but I read a number, not just the Leatherstocking ones, but some of his sea books as well.

So I had an affection for Cooper.  Over the years it's pained me to see his reputation among scholars decline, so today, when Tyler Cowen wrote this, it was a big surprise:

"Yes,I mean the book by James Fenimore Cooper.  I am reading it for the first time and it is much better than I had expected.  Mark Twain’s mockery of Cooper led me wrong, as I let it turn me away from being an appreciator.  And for all the more recent talk of the book being archaic and racist, I am finding it surprisingly sophisticated...."

Voter Fraud Commission

Trump's commission on voter fraud has requested data from all the states on voters names, addresses, ID's, registration, and voting records.  It's getting a lot of flak from the left and resistance from states both on the right (i.e. Mississippi) and left.

I'm a little conflicted on this, because I've a residual affection for the idea of a national identity, like Estonia, as an enabler for many good things.  I don't trust Mr. Kobach or Hans von Spakowsky.  In an ideal world there could be tradeoffs: do a national matching process to determine which voters are registered in more than one state and/or voted in more than one state while at the same time improving the national registry of firearms owners and those ineligible to own firearms.

That's a dream world though. As I posted recently, we have some security through chaos. Maybe one thing which could be done is to require states to do is bounce their voter registration lists against the SSA list of deceased voters (the same process as is done to avoid erroneous federal payments)>

ND Top Wheat State?

That's what this Grist post says.  It seems KS and ND are competing, with ND top in 2 of last 3 years. Grist attributes it to global warming. 

Safeway Ships Air Around the Country

 (Or how 3 pounds became 30.5 oz.)

Once upon a time, long long ago, coffee was sold in 3 pound cans.  This coffee was roasted and ground, ready for use in office coffee pots and home percolators.   The cans were cans, tin cans, cans which once emptied found many uses around the home. Coffee, being a storable agricultural commodity, was always subject to volatility in supply and so in price, despite the international cartel the supply management setup known as the International Coffee Agreement.  IIRC prices for 3 pounds of coffee ran around $3 in the early 70's.

As time went by, consumer prices for coffee increased and coffee roasters found resistance to paying the high prices.  So someone had the bright idea, instead of raising the price as we need to, let's reduce the amount of coffee in the can by a bit--same effect but consumers will be less upset. (This was probably the same someone who about the same time reduced the amount of candy in candy bars.) And the someone was right.

I don't know when flaked coffee was invented--there's a patent from 1991--but it was touted as a big innovation, delivering better taste for the coffee drinker. The thing about flaking is it means an increase in the volume of roasted coffee for the same weight.  Consumers lapped up flaked coffee.

Bottomline: between reducing the amount of coffee in a can and increasing the volume by flaking, the current Safeway "3 lb" can of coffee contains 30.5 oz, or just under two pounds.  And when you open the can, as I did yesterday, you find it's only about 3/4 full.

So ever since the first decision to reduce the weight without changing the size of the contained, Safeway has been shipping canned air from its warehouses to its stores, wasting space in its trucks.

(I should note that Folgers, and I assume other roasters, somewhat reduced the size of their containers when they switched from tin cans to plastic containers for their coffee.)