Farm Consolidation: First They Came for Poultry

In the 1940's our family farm was small, small dairy (12 cows), small poultry (1,000 hens), but with our garden we got by. I remember my mother fussing, she was a good fusser, about people from the city (a milk deliveryman, IIRC) buying a nearby farm and building a two-story henhouse.  This must have been during a peak in egg prices, possibly tied to a war, WWII or Korea. (This has a chart of inflation and deflation in egg prices since 1947.  Note how the prices vary from year to year.)  She'd gripe that people would see good prices and would jump into farming, expanding production (of eggs, in this case), resulting in overproduction and low prices.  This would hurt the established producers, like us, while proving the naivete of the city  folk.

My mother had German ancestry, so when she experienced schadenfreude when Hurricane Hazel in the 1950's came through and caused the collapse of that henhouse, she was doing what Germans do.  By then egg prices had dropped. Our neighbors never rebuilt.  After dad died, mom kept on with the hens into the 70's, but the infrastructure, the trucker, faded away.

I think poultry  was the first agricultural commodity where there was a turn from small farms to vertical integration through contract farming and large operations. The first, but not the last.  Dairy has followed, as have hogs.  Don't know about beef.  In field crops there's been a somewhat similar process of consolidation, though I think not with vertical contracts. Instead I think there's been a move to more sophisticated marketing, futures, etc.

What's the trigger for this post?  This dailyyonder piece discusses the impact of these trends in Iowa, including the observation that hog farms have decreased by 90 percent since 1977.

My title is from the mantra about the Jews from Martin Niemoller. He was saying to act early.  I'm pretty sure there was little or nothing anyone could have done to stop these trends. 

Be Fair to Historical Figures?

These days we judge historical figures very freely.  As a failed historian of an older generation, I get queasy with many of the judgments.  Too often they're made by applying current standards to the past, without allowing for the everyday realities people faced.

What are valid standards:

• certainly we can criticize person A when comparable figures at the same time thought, wrote, and acted differently. The issue then becomes what's "comparable"? If Martin Luther King worked for integration as an activist, can we say all politicians, either holding or seeking office, were morally lacking if they did not work for integration?  LBJ worked for integration, but not as soon or fast or strong as MLK wanted.  Do we judge LBJ against MLK or against JFK or Ike or Nixon? 
• there's another standard which can be applied.  I get this one from  a professor's lecture  on Jackson at Readex: if Indian removal was wrong, what was right, what was the alternative?

In some cases I know the answer is tragic, the conflict is irreconcilable.  

More or Less United Now?

Had an exchange with Megan McArdle which triggered some thoughts:  the issue is whether the US is more united now than in 1950's.  McArdle cited the decline of trust in most of our institutions  That was in response to my citing the exclusions of Catholics, Jews, blacks, etc. from society and battles over race and the Cold War. 

I think really there are different dimensions at play here.  In some respects we have a much more national society today; the differences among regions, among segments of society, are much diminished.  Strong regional institutions (think department stores or newspapers) have declined, while national institutions like Walmart and Amazon have come to the fore. 

But while we're more national in one sense, we're much more specialized in another.  In the 1950's there were three TV networks, three news weeklies, etc.  So there's much more diversity in other dimensions.

It seems to me people have an intuitive/ideal sense of the United States, of who "we are" and how close-knit we are. Who we include and who we exclude varies, both from person to person and from time to time.  Sometimes the decisions are conscious and can be explicitly stated; normally it's more of an unconscious thing. I think in the 1950's probably the average person excluded more people than they would today.

Billy Graham

Billy Graham was a Presbyterian growing up (although he became a Southern Baptist minister), my grandfather and two great grandfathers were Presbyterian ministers.

The obits in the Times and Post praised him,

In my memory my family were skeptical of him initially.  Evangelists had a poor reputation among mainline Protestants.  My grandfather had fought against fundamentalism in  Presbyterianism and Graham was Dismissing him as a press hound seeking attention was easy.  But he grew on them.  No scandals, relatively enlightened on race, appearing to be bipartisan.  We didn't know he was a prime mover in opposition to a Catholic president, though at least my mother would have agreed. We didn't know he was a suck-up to Nixon, going along with his anti-Semitism.

So he wasn't perfect, and he wasn't a moral leader like MLK.

Civil Rights at USDA

The Civil Rights office at USDA has a long and not lustrous history, undergoing a number of reorganizations, changes of leadership, and unfavorable audit reports from OIG and GAO.

There's more controversy today, as an employee in the office made a very public (in the Jefferson auditorium)  allegation of sexual misconduct:

Before an audience of USDA employees in Jefferson Auditorium at USDA headquarters, Davis said she was fed up by what she described as years of sexual harassment and retaliation by senior management in civil rights offices. She said she had had consensual sex with D. Leon King, a director in the Office of Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, in exchange for a promised promotion. Davis also named Brian Garner, director of the Farm Service Agency’s Office of Civil Rights, and several other top officials as contributing to a hostile work environment.

Josh Marshall on Collusion

Yesterday I posted skepticism about the collusion narrative.  Today Josh Marshall at TPM offers a reasoned rebuttal to the more prominent skeptics.

Contrarian Time: Trump, Russia, Guns

I'm feeling contrarian today so I'll voice two opinions which will be unpopular with my fellow liberals (most of them):

• I don't think the Russians were really motivated to elect Trump as president; I think they wanted to cause trouble and weaken Clinton.  That fits my judgment that there wasn't serious collusion/conspiracy between Trump and the Russians--Trump himself is too disorganized and his campaign so catch as catch can that conspiracy doesn't work.  Instead, I'll fall back on Murphy's law, and a corollary: different people doing different things and not knowing what they were doing.  (If an alternate history could swap the personalities of the candidates, I'd judge there was collusion between Clinton and the Russians.)
• I hope Congress doesn't act on gun control between now and November.  I well remember Clinton's crime bill in 1994, which included stuff for the right and an assault weapon ban for the left.  We lost Congress that fall.  The last thing we liberals need this year is anything which increases energy on the right.  (Yes, I may be misreading the climate of opinion; we may finally have reached that Holy Grail of a turning point on guns.  But I doubt it.)

Blast from the Past: J.K. Galbraith

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money posts about reading J.K. Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" (it's been 60 years since its publication).  That was a very influential book for liberals back in the days of the New Frontier.  But then came Michael Harrington and his "The Other America" which (re)discovered poverty.  Between the two, they shaped much of my thinking back then.

Trump Budget Proposal

From here:

 The Budget supports the Secretary’s efforts to reorganize Agency functions to improve the customer and consumer experience. Under the new structure, the Farm Service Agency, Risk Management Agency, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service would be merged under the Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation. In addition, the Secretary has established an Under Secretary of Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs to sharpen USDA’s focus on increasing agriculture exports to foreign markets. The Budget also supports consolidating fair practices, standards work, and commodity procurement within the Agricultural Marketing Service. These, and other related reorganizations, are expected to improve the way USDA delivers its services. In addition, the Budget supports the creation of a business innovation center in each mission area that would handle support activities in order to avoid duplicative functions and maximize collaboration between agencies.
Improves Customer Service. Modernizing program delivery and improving customer service at USDA is an important focus of the Administration. USDA is partnering with the White House Office of American Innovation to modernize its systems undertaking four key strategies: strengthening strategic IT governance; consolidating end-user services and data centers; enabling a strategic approach to data management and introducing data-driven capabilities; and improving the USDA customer experience. The Budget supports these efforts to improve service delivery by requesting funds to develop a centralized customer service portal for customers served by the Department’s three service center agencies. This single, integrated, producer-centric web portal would provide expanded and more effective and efficient access to useful online USDA services to meet the needs of agricultural producers. By optimizing service delivery, USDA can support agricultural producers to reach their productive potential and advance the U.S. economy

The Budget proposes to optimize and improve crop insurance and commodity programs in a way that maintains a strong safety net. The Budget does this while also achieving savings, eliminating subsidies to higher income farmers, and reducing overly generous crop insurance premium subsidies to farmers and payments made to private sector insurance companies. The Budget includes a bold set of proposals, including those that would reduce the average premium subsidy for crop insurance from 62 percent to 48 percent and limit commodity, conservation, and crop insurance subsidies to those producers that have an Adjusted Gross Income of $500,000 or less. In addition, the Budget proposes reductions to overly generous subsidies provided to participating insurance companies by capping underwriting gains at 12 percent, which would ensure that the companies receive a reasonable rate of return given the risks associated with their participation in the crop insurance program. The Budget proposes to eliminate an unnecessary and separate payment limit for peanut producers and limit eligibility for commodity subsidies to one manager per farm.

An Originalist Second Amendment Proposal for Gun Control

A quick sketch of a contrarian position on gun control.

The Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment abstracts it from the original context in which the amendment was adopted.  Returning to its history would permit us to control guns effectively.

In the 18th century America, guns were a necessity for life on the frontier, if not in the cities.  But colonial governments, and I assume state goverments,were concerned that all militia members be well armed, going so far as to buy muskets and furnish them to the militia. 

Militias were geographically based; you went to war with your friends and neighbors, with your kin and fellow church members.  You typically I believe elected your officers, the captain of your company. 

My point: militia members knew the capabilities and limitations of their fellows.  They knew who were the klutzes and who the sharpshooters, who was slightly touched in the head, who drank and who was dangerous when drunk.   

These networks provided a social control on gun possession, a social control which current jurisprudence does not provide.

My Modest Proposal:  We require all gun owners to either:

• have the signature of a person who knows them and has some status in the community. For example: an adult relative, a fellow church member, an NRA club member, a government official (Senator, congressperson, state rep).  The list can be expanded.
• maintain his or her weapons in a repository operated by a gun club, NRA club, or firing range.

Requiring a co-signature on a gun purchase application could provide a better check on gun purchases than a database check, since it makes the co-signor liable for the misdeeds of the gun owner.  By putting the NRA in the loop, there's assurance that the measure isn't aimed at confiscating weapons.