What The? Locavore Defends a CAFO?

That's not really the case, but it's a headline grabber. :-) What Walt Jeffries is really doing is defending rationality--mostly notably the fact that any animal operation has to deal with death so the simple fact a CAFO might have a few dead pigs is meaningless. My parents didn't do pigs, but my memory is we'd have a few dead hens in a year from a flock of about 1,000--but when predators got in or we got hit with infectious disease, the toll went up. And we lost some cows--broken hip, milk fever, ingested metal. It happens.

Marian Robinson

Since the President's mother-in-law is just a tad older than I, I can sympathize with her resistance to change as reported in this NYTimes article. (I particularly identified with the plotting her children did to persuade her to move.) Nice to know she's happy.

Words of Wisdom

From a piece in the NY Times on how Daisuke Matsuzaka's former baseball team used the $50+ million they got from the Boston Red Sox for his rights.

“If you are comfortable in the toilets, then everything is comfortable.”

Truer words were never uttered.

Some context:

Whereas the old facilities were dingy concrete latrines, state-of-the-art urinals line the men’s rooms along with high-tech hand dryers built into the bright blue and white tile — the team colors. But the main attractions are the new toilets with TotTo’s Warmlet seats in stalls with floor-to-ceiling doors.

Each stall in the women’s bathrooms holds a Toto Washlet, a toilet and bidet in one unit. These $1,500 fixtures provide a luxurious experience for fans, who may spend their time in the restrooms contemplating the full extent of Matsuzaka’s legacy with the Lions.

And if you're interested in the subject, read The Big Necessity. (The foodies pay lots of attention to the front end, but they're mostly whippersnappers and will find the back end more interesting as they age.)

A Criticism of National Black Farmer Association

Here's a press release criticizing John Boyd and his association

Best Sentence of May 2

Today the wife is away playing so I'm getting some spring cleaning done. But this is definitely the best sentence I've read today:

"Many of us get unique subsidies for keeping our body temperature close to 98 degrees"

From John Phipps re: cap and trade/environmentalism and farming.

Engber at Slate on High Fructose Sugar

See here for what seems to be a good summary of the corn-derived, high fructose sugar issue.

Limits of Gov. 2.0

GovLoop.com is billed as a Social network for Government. (Still don't understand it, but I've added its RSS feed.) There's an interesting post here pointing out the limits of the sort of suggestion system the Obama administration has used, first before inauguration, and now in connection with recovery.gov. The main point is, by exposing ideas for user evaluation as they are posted, you get a big first mover advantage. Once you have 3 digits worth of suggestions, only the oddball like me will scroll through and evaluate. The writer prefers this:

Imagine if the National Dialogue first enabled submission of ideas with examples on an equal basis. Then it enabled a simultaneous consideration with an ability of public comment. Then the ideas were vetted based on the public comment received. And finally, the final ideas were then submitted with an alternative analysis based on meritocracy. The final ideas could credibly be considered by the broader audience, based on merit.

Division in the Ranks

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives has an April 23 press release attacking the Black Farmer demo of April 28. Devotes some words to the idea that it's the lawyers who are gaining from the effort on Pigford.

National Black Farmers

Had their demonstration on April 28. It didn't get much coverage, and the accuracy of the coverage it got was a bit lacking. The conference scheduled for yesterday seems to have evaporated, or at least disappeared from the website.

White House Harvest

Obamafoororama says the White House had their first harvest yesterday--lettuce. The accompanying picture looks more as if the kids are planting than harvesting. (The girls predominate--is that a reflection of the feminine nurturing principle.) They might have gotten some lettuce, because the pictures back when showed they were using transplants, not seeds. So a couple weeks growth made them harvestable, and purely by accident it's 100 days into the administration.

My wife's lettuce is up and coming, but it will be a while yet before we have salad--probably May 15 or so.

H1N1 Flu and Locavores

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain sees things differently than I did here--he believes locavore pig farmers won't be hurt, indeed will be helped, by the flu headlines. Perhaps he and his wife have more faith in the ability of people to resist scares. Or perhaps he's right, his niche is better bounded and more secure than I think. Time will tell (and hopefully I'll remember to check back on the issue. If not, blame senility.)

Expanding Animal Rights: Privacy?

NYTimes has an article on drugs and Kentucky Derby horses--one trainer cited the horse's privacy in refusing to talk to the reporter.

Stimulus Helping Curious George?

USDA has a new site for the stimulus act, a map showing the locations of work being funded by the act. Hat tip: FarmPolicy.com.

It's progress as far as transparency goes, but the underlying data is sparse. For example, Forest Service has $18K for Curious George. Actually, that's a cheap shot--the creators of "Curious George" founded a center for good crunchy type activities, about which you can read more at their site. I'm sure they'll make good use of the money. But when FS gives the dollar figure and the recipient, without providing any explanation, it's short-sighted and not very helpful. As I've suggested to USDA in their comments, they should either provide a paragraph of explanation or require the recipient to put up a page of explanation of what they're doing with the money, and include the URL of the page in the USDA site.

Obama and Old-Time Farming

From an Obama speech on education:

We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day. That calendar may have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea. [emphasis added]

Our President may know many things, but not farms. (Or, more likely, his speechwriter(s) don' know farms.) Farm kids do plow, did plow. My grandfather remembered breaking a field in southern Illinois probably at the end of the Civil War. But getting out of school early in the afternoon in order to plow isn't and wasn't standard practice. They could have said "...at home to do the chores, milk the cows and feed the chickens." That would fit if they're concerned about the short school day. (Some charter schools, particularly KIPP, make a point of lengthening the school day.

Or, if they're concerned about the short school year, they could have talked about tending the crops, doing the haying, harvesting. That would vary depending on the area and the type of farming.

(On something different, if I read it right Iowa went from 5 percent to 45 percent of corn planted in about a week. I know modern equipment can cover lots of ground very fast, but that seems incredible. Must have been a lot of 16-hour days.)

Acre Handbook

FSA has posted the handbook which includes instructions for the ACRE program on their website. I hope Chris Clayton at DTN is satisfied with it. (But a warning--a handbook covering a new program is just the same as version 1.0 of software used to be (remember back in the 1980's when we actually had versions 1.0?)--subject to bugs and needing improvement.)

Agricultural History--Michael J Roberts

Prof. Roberts has an invaluable post at Greed, Green and Grains with some historical graphs of field crop yields and prices, entitled Six Stylized Facts about U.S. Agricultural Subsidies. A shorthand list, but read the whole thing:

1. Agricultural subsidies started in the mid-30's at the same time crop yields started increasing.
2. (In economese--my dubious interpretation). Farmers change their use of cropland based on federal policy, not prices.
3. About half the ag land is rented.
4. Over last 20 years, farmers get biggest fastest in areas with the highest per-acre subsidy.
   
5. Farmers are wealthy, particularly compared to other rural residents.
6. Nature of subsidies has changed over time and don't depress world prices.

Unfortunately, some of his references are available only to academics.

Babcock on FCIC

From Farmgate:

The question of governmental support for farmers’ risk management will receive either strong support or opposition, and a lesser number of folks who ride the fence. One of those with strong opinions is Iowa State University ag economist Bruce Babcock, whose thoughts are published in the Spring edition of the Iowa Ag Review. Babcock describes the programs as complex in their administration, and adds that crop insurance agents are paid commissions fully funded by taxpayers, most of the RMA (crop insurance) program risk is borne by taxpayers, and all of the FSA program risk is paid for by taxpayers....

Babcock says Congress continues to support the status quo, which is not surprising if it maintains the industry of agriculture. But he says it is not easy to understand the support of the crop insurance industry, since it duplicates FSA programs. He suggests more public awareness will result in change or the need to save money to finance the rest of the federal budget.

Almost 30 years ago we supposedly made the decision to end the duplication. :-) I'm hardly an objective observer, but I think the course of history since then is a tribute to the lobbying power of the crop insurance industry.

(For a more objective view, from CRS via Farm Policy.)

North American Flu and Locavores

It's not "swine-flu", it's "North American flu" because it is a mixture of strains of flu (human, bird, swine) so WHO says to call it by its location.

I assume foodies like Obamafoodorama will jump on it, as in this:

"There are all kinds of environmental and "nutritional" arguments for smaller, regional and local food production, and an event like the current pork pushback is yet another reason why unchaining American Ag from the vagaries of global trade makes sense in the 21st century. Local and regional food sourcing is also a better model in terms of general food safety (we currently are capable of inspecting less than one percent of our own imported foods). Our recent domestic foodborne disease outbreaks have been national in scope because of our trans-continental distribution system, in which a single peanut or pistachio plant can poison the entire country. Smaller and more local also makes much sense in terms of economic security for American farmers, because they're not put at risk for economic destruction by the decisions---perhaps panic based--of distant foreign governments."

It seems to make sense, but I doubt it. The problem is the market is not truly local. For example, if CAFO's can't export pork, they won't plow under the pigs, they'll sell the pork in the U.S. Now a locavore pasture-raised pig grower probably depends on being able to charge a significant premium for her higher-quality pork. But if a pork chop at the Safeway goes to half price, that's likely to draw away customers for the locavore pork. And the lesson learned over and over in agriculture is that the big boys have the reserves to ride out the hard times.

Do We Have 60?

My latent party feeling is stirred by the prospect Sen. Specter may switch to the Dems, which, with Sen. Franken (as oxymoronic as that phrase is), would give the Dems 60 votes in the Senate. It would be very interesting to see what would happen to the idea of lowering the political temperature in DC in that case.

Get Out Those Gardening Tools

From a Government executive post on the USDA garden:

Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan "... also repeated Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's challenge to USDA facilities worldwide to create similar gardens and create healthier landscapes. When asked if the gardens at USDA facilities around the world have to be organic, Merrigan replied she understands that organic is not possible everywhere because she comes from New England, where it is hard to raise some crops organically. Gardening methods "are not going to be dictated decisions from headquarters," she said. That should come as a relief to USDA's workers in Farm Service Agency, Rural Development and Natural Resources and Conservation Service offices in nearly every county in the country, as well as Foreign Agricultural Service offices overseas. The workers will undoubtedly want their gardens to be blooming by whatever method when Vilsack and Merrigan visit and ask to see them."

Of course, USDA owns few, if any, of its buildings. (I'm not even sure they own the lawn to the Administration Building and there is no lawn to the South Building.) So the question becomes whether the landlords will agree to gardens and if they will charge for such agreement.

A Good Sentence

"We had slime mold growing upstairs.”

There are certain people who belong on a different planet than the rest of us, and the person who uttered that sentence is one of them. It's from a short Freakonomics post on the Sereno family of Chicago, whose accomplishments seem to outweigh those of the Emanuel family of Chicago (who definitely beong on a different planet).

And no, the Serenos weren't poor housekeepers, they were nurturing intellectual curiosity.

Unsung Hero of Copyright

Barbara A. Ringer died at 83. Why should you care? Well- she was a great bureaucrat who pushed through our modern copyright law, as well as being a pathbreaking feminist in the Federal service.

No, I hadn't heard of her before I read her obit in today's Post. A sentence from it:

Foreseeing the rise of the Internet, she inserted provisions into the law to protect authors from the unauthorized reproduction of their work, even by means not yet devised.

Is There a Nitpickers'Anonymous?

I need a 12-step program. I was casually surfing the Growing Power site (the Chicago/Milwaukee urban farming operation that's gotten ink and a MacArthur Genius Award) and ran across this:

"At Growing Power it becomes worm food. We collect

over 20,000 lbs. of brewery waste from Lakefront Brewery every week

for compost or 1.4 million tons of waste annually."

20,000 lbs a week is 10 tons, or 520 tons a year according to old math. To be fair, I suspect some enthusiastic humanities student was writing the blurb (look at all those "o" sounds), and had a mind lapse when setting down the units of measure).

Sometimes You Can't Win

The CourierPress (KY) has a piece on a long conflict between FSA and a black farmer over farm loans. The latest episode has the man arrested for his words on a phone call, which were interpreted as a threat. As he's 82, it seems to have been overreaction. On the other hand, how much strength does it take to pull a trigger?

One doesn't know the rights and wrongs of the case, though there's lots of comments on the article, most of which assume some misaction on the part of the government. Of course, the infamous $60 million lawsuit in DC over the missing pants from the drycleaners is a reminder that not all suits are well-founded.

Poor Walt Whitman

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries quotes a piece on a protest of Walt, at the school named in his honor. The protestors were from Topeka, KS. They think he doesn't deserve a school.

Today's Amish Problems

LA Times has a story on the Amish in Indiana--many are off the farm due to high land prices and high population, pushing them into the system. Now some are laid off, and collecting unemployment.

The Amish have adapted to economic crises before. During the Depression, some men were permitted to register for driver's licenses, according to research by Nolt. That special exemption is less likely to happen this time, the professor said, because the Amish have come to view the horse and buggy as core parts of their identity.

This recession is especially brutal because the Amish factory workers became accustomed to earning annual salaries of $60,000 to $100,000, which provided for mortgages and shopping trips. A fiberglass basketball hoop hangs above a buggy in one driveway. The Wal-Mart has a hitching post. And some Amish men are as attached to their cellphones as their beards.

Prof. Kraybill has observed there's a tension between someone being the leader of an enterprise and boss of a number of employees and the self-effacement that's expected of Amish. Will be interesting to see how this works out over the years.

Slowness Serves as Validation Check

My wife and I had some problems getting our passports through. (A word of advice--never say you have no plans for foreign travel, even when you don't. The system seems to be set up to expect a specific departure date. When I looked up my grandfather's passport application in ancestry.com it showed specific departure date and place. So probably the State Dept. has just carried that forward over the centuries, regardless of the fact that passports are being required for any foreign travel, even Canada and Mexico, these days.)

Anyhow, my problems made me attend to news reports, including this. GAO found they were issuing some passports based on SSN's of dead people (also sounds like FSA's problem in the past). Turns out:

State was experiencing a relative lull in applications in late 2008 after a spike in 2007, Sprague noted. The database check can take a day, which was never an issue when employees faced a backlog of applications in 2007, she said. But when the workload decreased and passport applications could be processed much faster, some specialists and supervisors didn't know to wait for the database check to be completed.

So the interface between State and SSA worked fine as long as State was slow enough. I love it.

Our Ancestors Ruined the Soil

From Farmgate summary, on combating soil compaction: "He says MN researchers have found compaction remaining from 1880’s covered wagons."

Byrd Benevolence and American History

For those interested in the teaching of history, in teaching, period, and in how our government works (which means anyone interested in humans), I recommend this post at History Net. (The context is a discussion of the effectiveness or lack thereof of the money spent on history teaching by the federal government, under a program instigated by Senator Byrd.)

Don't Understand--15 Weeks of CSA?

I clicked on the Borski Farms site via a link from a foodie site. It's an organic farm in Utah, but its CSA shares run only 15 weeks. I guess that must reflect a much shorter growing season in Utah than in VA, but I don't know what Mormon locavores are supposed to do the other 37 weeks of the year?

But the Free Market Depends on Enlightened Self Interest

"it’s almost impossible to overstate the power of the laziness of the bond investor."

That's a quote via Kevin Drum from Felix Salmon discussing economics and risk. Enlightened self-interest implies something other than being a couch potato. That's one problem with the free market economists--they're idealists who see humans as better than we are.

Doug Caruso Has Friends

That's how he become FSA administrator --see Brownfield. (It's true in DC as elsewhere, it's who you know.) He's tight with the head of the House appropriations ag subcommittee and the Senate appropriations ag subcommittee. (That's better than being friends with Peterson and Harkin, the heads of the ag committees--the appropriations people control what's actually done. That's the reason the Ag building is the Jamie Whitten building, named after the longtime House approp man.)

A Good Sentence and a Horrible One--David Brooks

David Brooks had an op-ed on Obama's administration Tuesday with two sentences I want to note:

"If he pulls this mantle [of being the party of order, responsibility and small-town values] away from the Republicans, it would be the greatest train robbery in American politics...."

"Even F.D.R. decided to concentrate on the banking crisis in his first year and put other issues off until 1934 and beyond. "

The second sentence is simply wrong. FDR proposed a bunch of major legislation during his first hundred days, and didn't do that much legislatively in 1934.

Office Supplies: A Tangled Web from Gore?

Just noted a Politico post on the Obama cabinet meeting, mocking the idea that DHS can save money by buying office supplies in bulk. The following is pure speculation:

Long ago, when I was a new Federal employee, it was explained to me that the General Services Administration essentially had a monopoly on government procurements. I believe it was a FEDSTRIP program, operated using 80 column IBM punch cards. 80 characters was enough to identify the supply item from the GSA catalog, the quantity, and the destination. For some items, GSA had supply contracts the agency had to order from (like typewriters, etc.).

Over the years the GSA monopoly eroded. A major contributor was Vice President Gore, who pushed for the "reengineering of government procurement", much of it by giving government credit cards to employees who could then go to the local Office Depot store to shop for supplies.

So, DHS may be in the process of reinventing the wheel again, deciding it's cheaper to do centralized purchases than decentralized.

(BTW, for what it's worth, which is nothing, it's possible all the changes were rational. If you compare an existing process, encumbered by lots of junk inherited from the past, to a new process, rationally designed, the new may always win. Of course, rational designs often don't allow for human weaknesses, like fraud, or irrational purchases.)

NYTimes Reports the End of the World

But they buried the information inside the business section. I'm referring to an article with this lede:

Lockheed Martin will accept the Pentagon’s plans to phase out the F-22 fighter jet and will not lobby Congress to build more of the expensive planes, a top executive said on Tuesday.

This news, if true, is in the "hell freezes over" category.

White Smoke--We Have an FSA Administrator-Designate

Doug Caruso, former Wisconsin SED, has been named

Payment Limitation Twists

John Phipps seems to report a reaction to the FSA forms.

Pigford Returns

I'm not sure what the Pigford case has to do with food, but Obamafoodorama posts about its current and near future status:

Most of the post is given over to a history, rather inaccurate IMHO, of USDA's discrimination against black farmers and to a rally at USDA announced by John Boyd, National Black Farmers Association President (and mentioned at one time as a candidate for Secretary of Agriculture) for April 28, which is the date on the NBFA website. (The post said March 28, which must be a typo.) There's an impressive list of speakers for a followup conference on April 29. It will be interesting to see which of the invitees show up.

To continue my snark, I'd note sections of the NBFA website haven't been recently updated. However, there's some interesting recent messages on the message board, including one from a USDA retiree dissing the California people, particularly NRCS and RCD.

But, back to Obamafoodorama--its post links to an AP piece by Ben Evans, but skims its summary. Evans's piece includes this:

"With pressure to hold down costs, lawmakers set an artificially low $100 million budget. They called it a first step and said more money could be approved later.

But with 25,000 new claims and counting, the Obama administration is now arguing that the $100 million budget should be considered a cap to be split among the successful cases.

The position - spelled out in a legal motion filed in February and reiterated in recent settlement talks - would leave payments as low as $2,000 or $3,000 per farmer. Boyd called that "insulting."

So that position is the stimulus for Boyd's rally and conference.

Saving Money at USDA

From Obama's cabinet meeting comes the savings at USDA, the first item of which shouldn't really count for anything, since it was underway before the meeting (and, I strongly suspect, before Obama was sworn in, because the GAO audit probably triggered the change in procedure and that was last year.) (From a Post article of yesterday, see the preceding post.)

Improper Payments – USDA has worked with the Treasury Department to identify potential fraud and improper payments in farm programs. Beginning with the 2009 crop year and in successive years, all farm program payment recipients will be required to sign a form which grants the Treasury Department the authority to provide income information to USDA for verification purposes. The reform proposal would render those out of compliance ineligible for USDA payments. Savings under this proposal could reach $16 million a year.

Office Leases – USDA is working to combine 1,500 USDA employees from seven leased locations into a single facility in early 2011, saving $62 million over a 15-year lease term.

Training – The Rural Development office has been utilizing Internet training in place of in-person training with projected annual savings of $1.3 million.

An Answer on Publishing Official Notices

I blogged the other day on publishing official notices. From a Post piece on Obama's money-saving campaign:

In a blow to the newspaper industry, the U.S. Attorneys and the U.S. Marshals Offices’ Asset Forfeiture program will stop publishing judicial forfeiture notices in print and will do so online only, saving $6.7 million over the first five years of the move.

The World Is Overrun by the Young

Just saw Josh Marshall on the TPM RSS feed misspell Nikita Khrushchev's name twice. Not that I miss the Cold War, you understand.

Bureaucrat Brokaw

Tom Brokaw reveals his inner bureaucrat in today's NYTimes.

When I write "bureaucrat", I'm referring to the idea that reason and rationality are the supreme considerations, that order is important and history is not.

Brokaw points out the abundance of county and local governmental bodies in various states. He points to the abundance of higher educational institutions in the Dakotas. He suggests, as I think Gov. Corzine of NJ did a while back and a panel reviewing NY local government did, if we rationalized and consolidated functions we would save money.

No doubt it would, and no doubt we won't. Schools, governments, and similar bodies tend to die only when there's no bodies left to populate them or when a superior paradigm comes along. (I added the last phrase as a hat tip to my father, who was part of the "central school" movement in NY back in the 1920's. The movement got rid of the one-room schools by consigning pupils to bus rides to the "central school".

Words to Live By

"In other words, why procrastinate when you can perendinate? " From A.Word.A.Day from wordsmith.org.

FSA's Old Programs

This article about the possible conversion of VA health care programs from MUMPS to Java (based on success in similar conversions of legacy programs) raises the question:

Is there anyone out there who would offer to convert COBOL programs to Java for FSA?

License Plates in France

Dirk Beauregard blogs about license plates, the numbering system used in France and the new one used in the EU. Seems the French will now have lifetime license numbers, just as we can have lifetime phone numbers. The universally bureaucratic society creeps in on little cat feet.

Facebook: The Bureaucracy and I Have the Same Problem

Which is figuring out how to use the damn thing. See this article. (Actually, if I were in FSA, I'd try using it for internal communications, particularly field to DC. )

A Phrase I Never Thought to Hear

"boomer work ethic" --from a NY Times article on a financial company which hired boomers as temporary employees to answer phones complaining about their accounts.

I guess I'm brainwashed, but I never saw the boomers as conscientious employees, more like Sonny I guess.

Our Weak Government

I keep finding proof of our government's weakness. Here's another example--SSA is reliant on the states to process disability

The nation’s top Social Security official says benefits for tens of thousands of people with severe disabilities are being delayed by furloughs and layoffs of state employees around the country....

Claims are evaluated by state employees, but the federal government reimburses states for the salaries of those employees and pays the full cost of benefits for people found to be disabled.

“We pay the full freight,” Mr. Astrue said. “States do not save any money when they furlough or lay off these employees. They only delay payments to disabled citizens who rely on the monthly benefits.”

The point being, if you have to depend on people who don't report to you, your power is limited.

FSA and Stimulus Dollars II

FSA still has no plans or reports up on the USDA website. I guess they're still waiting for some political leadership to be appointed. The USDA spreadsheet does show some data for FSA programs.. It's interesting that, if you come to the USDA site from recovery.gov, you get a different page than you do if you click on the "Agency Plans and Reports" link from the USDA home site.

A note: the recovery.org site seems to be beating the government bureaucrats to display data on the stimulus package.

Did Cinderella Live Happily in Glass Slippers?

The obligatory post on Susan Boyle.