The Fat Chinese and Not a Corn Subsidy in Sight

Prof. Pollan blames federal farm program subsidies of corn and soybeans for our obesity, at least in part.

The Newshour had a piece last week on the growing obesity problem in China, which doesn't have the same sort of subsidies.  The reasons include the one-child policy (lots of adults to spoil the kids), lots of cars and less exercise, urbanization, fast food.  To the best of my knowledge the Chinese don't subsidize corn production.

Government and Wikipedia (Warning: Off-Color Word)

This New York Times article describes a deal between the British Museum  and Wikipedia.  It seems the Museum has realized that people go to Wikipedia to look up information on the Museum, much more than they go to the museum's web site.  So the museum decided: if you can't fight them, join them (or something like that). By cooperating with Wikipedia, they can get more info and more accurate info into the browsers of the users, which presumably in the long run benefits the museum.

The lead guy says: "“Ten years ago we were equal, and we were all fighting for position,” Mr. Cock said. Now, he added, “people are gravitating to fewer and fewer sites. We have to shift with how we deal with the Web.”

I don't know why the same logic doesn't work for all official sites which try to push information--put a good deal of effort into upgrading the Wikipedia pages and, in a pet peeve of mine, making your pages accessible to Google.  Of course, Wikipedia is skeptical of having bureaucrats updating pages on their own bureaucracy, but this is, I think, the wave of the future.

Column on Pigford Claims

Interesting column in the High Plains Journal, with which I agree:

If the Ag Census data is correct, it still seems difficult to understand how the number of people filing Pigford claims could be more than double the number of black farmers in the U.S. Unfortunately, few people at USDA are willing to even discuss this topic for fear of appearing racist.
In the interest of transparency, it would seem helpful to have USDA provide the names and more information about who has or will be receiving payments under the Pigford cases. Adding more "sunlight" to this issue might help close another heart-wrenching chapter in farm loan history.

Unfortunately the "table" of payment data she refers to does not appear.

USDA Rulemaking

From Chris Clayton:

One thing I asked Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack about at the Rural Summit was the complexity of rules, and delay getting rules out. He responded there were a lot of rules that certainly have been issued from the 2008 farm bill and that the department had more than 600 such rules to issue from the bill.

That sounds high to me, but what do I know.  I hope that's 600 in all stages of completion, and that most have notices of proposed rulemaking.  I'd hope the new Administrative Conference would work on helping to streamline the process, but I doubt it.  Most Congress people are happy to pass stuff they can point to with pride, and are much less concerned about actual implementation.

The Power of the Food Movement?

According to this article (HT Farmpolicy), consumption of high fructose corn syrup is down by 11 percent from 2003 to 2008.  The only thing in the article to explain the drop is consumer, and hence processor, resistance.  I know corn prices jumped over the same period, so it might be that "pure sugar", nature's food, processed from sugar cane or sugar beets, became a better buy over the time period.  But regardless of the explanation, the food movement will take credit and thus become more powerful in the eyes of other players in the food arena.

Just Another Washington Bureaucrat, Lenny Skutnik

Lenny just retired from the Congressional Budget Office, as noted on the Director's Blog. He didn't jump in the freezing icy Potomac for some "polar bear" stunt, but to save people from the Air Florida crash.

Optics of Cotton and Chickens

Two items froms Farm Policy: (Drafted this a while back, just finished it today.)


“To wit: our crusading president is going to send $150 million of your tax dollars to subsidize the Brazilian cotton industry. Why? so that he can continue to spend several billion more of your tax dollars subsidizing U.S. cotton farmers.
“Reps. Jeff Flake,R-Az., Ron Kind, D-Wisc., Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., and Barney Frank, D-Mass. (find the last time Barney Frank and Paul Ryan agreed on anything) have penned a note to the prez suggesting that perhaps the way to fix the problem is to end the U.S. cotton subsidies.”


Chickens are not nice people.
“Scientists and egg producers warn that deadly skirmishes that start with feather-plucking and turn into bloody frenzies when a bird’s pecking breaks a flockmate’s skin will increase if those same aggressive hens are moved from small cages with five to 10 birds to open pens that can hold dozens.”

Who Do You Have to Outrun When You're a Cotton Farmer?

The Post gets around to writing an editorial on the compensation the US government is giving Brazil for violating WTO rules on cotton subsidies. As you might expect, they condemn it. 

For some reason this sentence hit me: . "Thanks partly to the subsidies, U.S. producers can outcompete lower-cost producers on the world market; American farms account for about 40 percent of global exports."  Now it's the way we usually talk about international competition.  While it's accurate enough for casual talk, when you think about it, and when you remember the joke about the bear in the woods, it needs refinement.


The joke about the bear?  Two campers were in the woods in their tent, just waking up from sleep. All of a sudden across the clearing a bear appeared, obviously feeling as mean and unhappy as Mitch McConnell after the Kentucky primary. The bear starts towards the tent.  One camper opens the tent flap on the opposite side, the other starts putting on his shoes. The first camper says: "Run, we've got to outrun the bear to our car."  The second camper says: "No, I've only got to outrun you."  [Bad joke, I know.]

What's my point? The US has some efficient cotton producers and some not so efficient.  Other countries, like Burkina Faso, or Brazil, have some efficient producers and some not so efficient.  The subsidies we give to our cotton producers help the less efficient (usually the smaller and older ones) stay in business longer.  They also tend to keep people in cotton, rather than switching to other crops, like soybeans, though that effect is much less true that it used to be, say in the 1960's.  To the extent that the subsidies keep our production up, it means the less efficient producers in other nations are under more pressure, either to switch crops or to give up and let more efficient producers in their nation take over the land.

Given these interacting relationships it's difficult to say how badly the subsidies may hurt producers in other countries. So my refrain: "it's more complicated than you think."

Tit for Tat: 110 Murders in DC

Buried in this interesting article, one of a series on a sequence of murders/assaults in DC, is this statistic: about 110 of the 143 murders in DC last year were part of sequence of tit for tat retributions.  Scientists have gamed the right strategy for evolving cooperation, which turns out to be tit for tat with random acts of kindness.  Apparently in DC that strategy is alive and well, except for the random acts.

What struck me though was the idea 80 percent of all DC murders involve these relationships, which doesn't leave many for killings within the family or random acts. 

Peterson and USDA Organization

Sometime in the past the chair of House Ag, Rep. Peterson, was planning on working on a reorganization of USDA, specifically the county service end.  I'm operating on memory here, but I think that's right. 

But recently I've only heard about his hearings on what should be in the 2012 farm bill.  I don't know what that means--whether he's given up on the idea, whether he's planning on doing it next year, or whether he's waiting to see if he can kill the direct payment programs and replace them with crop insurance, which would probably impact the organization. 

Brooks Is Wrong

David Brooks today in the Times has a column on the American public's ambivalence--we don't want the government involved in lots of stuff but when there's a crisis, like the Deep Horizon blowout, we want the President to be front and center.

Here's the sentence I disagree with: "At some point somebody’s going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government." And closing with"

"We should be able to build from cases like this one and establish a set of concrete understandings about what government should and shouldn’t do. We should be able to have a grounded conversation based on principles 95 percent of Americans support. Yet that isn’t happening. So the period of stagnations begins."

My bottom line is it's an intellectual's fantasy.  We never, in all of American history, have had such a consensus by 95 percent of the American people.  What we've had in the past, and will have in the future, is a tug of war among our various principles and viewpoints, with the balance sometimes one way and sometimes another.  It would be too easy to say we never go all to one side.  We actually do: we decided over time that slavery was wrong, that hierarchical customs were wrong, that segregation was mostly wrong, etc.  But on the role of government we've gone back and forth.  And thus it will be in days ahead.

Accident = Russian Accent

The Post has a article today on an American woman who had an accident and recovered but with a "Russian" accent.  Apparently this is a rare but recognized phenomena, although the accents may differ.  Given the recent research on how the brain is modified by learning, I'm fascinated.

Memorial Day

Garrison Keillor at Wolf Trap last night spoke in memory of an Anoka, MN man, 2 years younger than he, who died in Vietnam.

I'm old enough to remember going to the cemetery on Memorial Day to clean the graves of my grandparents.  With the popularity of cremation such ceremonies will dwindle away.  Maybe that's why college students these days supposedly have less empathy for others.

Crop Insurance Administration

I wonder what the Congressional Research Service or GAO might do with a study of the administrative costs of crop insurance.

I wonder if any FSA CED's would volunteer to administer crop insurance policies for what the companies average? 

The Food Movement and the Tea Party Movement: Brothers Under the Skin?

I think there are a number of parallels between the Tea Party movement versus the Food Movement (as defined by Pollan):

1. Both have producerist strains: true value is not produced on Wall Street nor on big industrial farms; for foodies true value is produced by small family farmers.
2. Both see international institutions as antagonists.  The food movement attacks international corporations, the tea party attacks international government, the UN, the north American compact, etc
3. Both elevate local values over national and national over global values.
4. Both draw, I think, from the middle and upper middle classes, mostly white. The Tea Partiers may be a tad more suburban and red state, the foodies a tad more urban and blue state.
5. Both have anti-technology strains.
6. Both see the American people as innocent, passive victims.  The Tea Partiers give no hint that the government they dislike and the programs and institutions they would kill have been endorsed by both parties in popular elections going back for decades.  The foodies give no hint that the obesity they deplore and the food they would trash result from the choices of consumers and families over decades. 
7. Both seem to be nostalgic romantic movements, seeking to turn back the clock to an earlier time, at least in selected aspects.
8. Both are suckers to con-men with dubious schemes, such as vertical farming or the return to the gold standard.
   

Peterson on Payment Limitation

Today's FArm Policy led with this:

The Washington Insider section of DTN noted yesterday (link requires subscription) that, “Shifting away from direct payments [related graph] would go a long way toward resolving the problem of farm payment limits, which Ag panel Chairman Peterson sees as the main reason for opposition to federal farm program. ‘A lot of the huge payment issues would go away if you don’t have direct payments,’ Peterson said. Direct payments, he says, are what generates ‘all the opposition because we make payments to people who aren’t farming [such as] people who own land [but] who live in New York City.’

I'm not sure I follow his logic.  Yes, there's a difference between saying Bigshot farmer got $X in taxpayer money and saying he got $X in taxpayer subsidized insurance indemnities, but it's not that big a one. Certainly it won't fool the smart people in the food movement, and I doubt their friends in the mass media.  Maybe I'm wrong--twill be interesting to see. 

I believe I'm correct in saying, as a general rule, the people who get indemnity payments and the people who get direct payments should be the same people: i.e., those who have an interest in the crop.  There may be minor differences in how the rules work and there may be major differences in the administration of the rules, but again we'll see.

Payment LImitation and Crop Insurance

Some random thoughts triggered by EWG's publication of crop insurance data and the various testimonies before the House Ag committee on the trade-offs between FSA farm programs and insurance.

One thing not yet mentioned: payments under most FSA programs are subject to limitation, crop insurance is not.  So it would be logical for big farmers to push for putting more benefits under the crop insurance umbrella rather than FSA.  (What does that mean--raising benefits, cutting the loss needed to trigger payments.)  Cutting against that logic is the fact that cotton and rice producers seem to be the biggest fans of the traditional FSA programs, and not of crop insurance.

It might be possible to apply a payment limitation, or indemnity limit, to crop insurance--continue to subsidize the administrative costs and indemnities up to a given figure.  After all, FDIC insures savings accounts only up to $200,000 ($100,000 permanent); car insurance limits the liability amounts; homeowners insurance limits liability.

Overpaid Bureaucrats

Yes, I consider Federal Reserve members to be bureaucrats.  And I mean the title sarcastically.  See this via Wonkbook from the Wall Street Journal:


That means Ms. Yellen [paid $410,000 as chair of San Francisco Fed), who is President Barack Obama's nominee to be the next Fed vice chairman, would see her pay more than halved [to $179,700]  if she is confirmed to the post in Washington."

[Sorry, I blew the link.]

Discrimination Claims

AP has a story on a proposal to resolve claims of discrimination filed by Hispanics and women.

The Obama administration on Tuesday offered $1.3 billion to settle complaints from female and Latino farmers who say they faced discrimination from the Agriculture Department.
The proposal comes as Congress is poised to approve a $1.25 billion settlement with African-American farmers in a similar discrimination case. The agency also is negotiating with Native American farmers over another lawsuit.

The NY Times has a story on the Pigford claims.

Organic Grain Yields

From a farmgate post focused on the prices for organic soybeans and corn:

Singerman also reports several studies that indicate organic corn yields were 8 to 10% lower than conventional corn, and organic soybean yields were anywhere from 1% to 19% lower than conventional beans.

Here's the summary:

While price premiums for organic corn and soybeans may seem to be twice that of the prices of conventional crops, that relationship may be more coincidental than normal. Prices for both organic and conventional crops can be volatile, but they are set in different markets, they do not move in lock step with each other, and conventional crops cannot be substituted for organic crops meaning they are separate commodities.

Organic Milk

Had to buy milk today so I checked the coolers.  My Safeway has 7 coolers devoted to milk of various kinds (whole, reduced fat, organic, soy, etc. etc.).  Of the 7, 2 were organic, a proportion which surprised me a bit.  The Safeway doesn't serve the richest clientele in the richest county in the country; lots of immigrants live in the area, though many of those are doing well.  But 30 percent organic is pretty good market penetration.

And, although the taste tests in this Grist post were a bit inconclusive, supermarket organic milk came out pretty well.

Pollan in the NY Review of Books

Michael Pollan has a review article in the NY Review of Books.  Briefly he sees a "food movement"

Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids. 

He has problems with his facts and history in three cases

The dream that the age-old “food problem” had been largely solved for most Americans was sustained by the tremendous postwar increases in the productivity of American farmers, made possible by cheap fossil fuel (the key ingredient in both chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and changes in agricultural policies. Asked by President Nixon to try to drive down the cost of food after it had spiked in the early 1970s, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially) at any cost.

This is a repeat of an error from The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is wrong.  Butz didn't have this power, the legislation passed by Congress was a change, but in the long view not that big of a change, and the decisions Butz made to lower loan rates were reversed by his successor after he was fired and during President Ford's reelection campaign.

Again:

Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.

Did household income decline since 1970?  No. See this wikipedia article   Or see this for a quick view. Note he doesn't cite women's lib, which some of his readers might be supportive of.

And finally he twice refers to the White House "organic garden".  Wrong--Michelle's garden is not organic, though it leans that way. See Obamafoodorama.

Problems in Madagascar and Globalization

The NY Times has an article on how the new regime in Madagascar, a biologically unique island,  is lax on logging of its forests. What struck me was the picture showing loggers, one of whom is wearing what looks to be an American football jersey with the number 72.  I don't know how the jersey arrived on the man, but it's another indication of how interconnected we've become.

Ron Paul and the Food Movement?

Via John Phipps, Ron Paul says:

The Green Revolution -- a misleading name applied by PR firms to the onset of globalized, chemical-intensive, industrial agriculture that is anything but friendly to the environment -- is coming unraveled around the world, bringing devastation to farmers from the plains of China to the plains of America.

I'm not sure most foodies would be comfortable sharing a bed with Ron Paul. My stereotype is that the food movement, as Michael Pollan christens it, is generally leftish.

French See Our Farmers Markets and Go One Better

According to Mr. Beauregarde, they converted the whole Champs Elysses to a farmers market with 8,000 young farmers:

The aim of the operation, which started on Sunday and finishes at 8pm this evening is to remind Parisians that 80% of the nation’s territory is still predominantly rural, even if only 20% of the French actually live there, and 10% of the French still earn a living from the land. That living though can no longer be called a life. Revenues of the nation’s dairy farmers and cereal growers have fallen by 30% over the last two years, and things are not set to get much better with the forthcoming révision of the Common Agricultural Policy. So, today’s « display » of the nation’s agricultural wealth in the nation’s capital is to tell all those big city types that French agriculture can deliver the goods, but not for very long.

Picking on Texas

Briefly, the Post carried an article on the revised social studies curriculum for Texas schools on Friday, Ann Althouse posted an extensive criticism of the article Sunday morning at 1:48 am, and Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy posted early this afternoon.  Adler started off with Althouse in being critical, but it's become reasonably clear that the Texans published proposed standards in April, which is what Althouse read, but last week they made some more changes, which is what the Post article referred to, so Adler has switched to being critical of Althouse.

In addition to taking pride in being right (I commented on Althouse's post that the pdf's she referred to were last revised in April) I think the episode is interesting on several counts:

• Althouse jumped to conclusions, dissing the Post and defending the Texans. And her commenters mostly followed suit.  This might count as conservative close-mindedness, but more reasonably it's just another example of how easily we all follow our prejudices in what we accept.
•  Adler gets props for acknowledging his initial error.
• Althouse's jump was based on the assumption that the Texan pdf files were the latest version. That's probably the most interesting thing: we now assume that official actions are available on line and that they will be updated promptly.
• Texas bureaucrats get dinged--they wasted lots of time and electrons by failing to update their documents as fast as we expect.  If only they had used Google Documents, they could and should have been updated as the commission adopted changes and the documents up on the Net as the meeting ended.

[Updated: Althouse has added to her post to modify her position somewhat and to reflect some of the info available from the Post.  I'm disappointed though with the tenor of her addition, but anyone who's blogging at 3 in the morning! deserves some sympathy.

Meanwhile the American Historical Association sent a letter to Texas which is interesting.]

What's Hot? What's Not? (Bureaucracy)

Via Chris Blattman, the lexicalist site allows you to search the Internet stream (hey, I sound as if I know what I'm doing) and maps the results.  I searched for "bureaucracy" and got this:

"People are talking about this 27% less today than they were a month ago (on average, once every 1,678,795 words)."

Virginia and Iowa are the hottest venues.

{Updated: Meanwhile those stoic Down-easters in Maine have "love" on their mind.  And maybe Rep. Souder can blame his fellow citizens for his troubles, because Indiana is second.]

Kathleen Parker and Real Heroes

The Post's Pulitizer winning columnist, Kathleen Parker, opines on the Blumenthal false claims, ending thus:

"Had he gone to Vietnam, as he apparently thinks he should have, he would have learned that, and this: Real heroes never brag, and real Marines don't lie."

Very snappy, opines I, but real Marines are human like the rest of us, with their own fair share of failings, including falseness. And it'd be nice to think of Vietnam as a great school, but someone should check its accreditation.

Those Wimpy Liberals

Turns out we're easily "nudged" to save energy or otherwise be environmentally correct.  Meanwhile, those stalwart, independent-minded conservatives react to such "nudges" by wasting more energy.

(Or maybe I could interpret this as liberals being rational, conservatives irrational? Feels better to me.)

EWG and Crop Insurance

Over the last 15 years FSA bureaucrats have sometimes squirmed as the Environmental Working Group published farm program payment data on its website  and the news media wrote stories about it.
may now feel a little schadenfreude  vis a vis their crop insurance compatriots. EWG now has published crop insurance indemnity and administrative cost figures for 1995-2009.  I'm sure people with an axe to grind can make some hay out of it (though using an axe to cut grass doesn't work well).

Farm Bill Developments

I keep starting posts commenting on the latest farm bill developments.  But the House Ag committee hearings are generating stuff faster than I can finish a post, so the bottom line is: see Farm Policy,and Chris Clayton,as well as the testimony at the House Ag committee site.

I think what I'll do is occasionally offer observations on implications of various proposals.  

Chicago Climate Exchange

A long while ago I blogged about a Northeast farmer who was selling carbon offsets. At the time I was leery of his claims, but it was the first time I'd run into the idea that farmers were currently selling offsets.  It now seems, according to this post on the sale of the Chicago Climate Exchange, that such offsets are selling for $.10 a ton. No need to comment further, I think--the market has spoken.

Whose Bureaucrats Are Better: US or Marshall Islands?

Apparently Transocean, a company involved in the Gulf oil spill, likes to put its rigs under the Marshall Islands flag.

Maybe we should outsource parts of the government to the Marshall Islands?

Kids Don't Like Vegetables, Particularly Beans

That's the lesson I get from Ed Bruske's latest report from the school lunch front, spending time in school kitchens from DC to Berkeley.  Apparently roasting vegetables helps, and camouflaging them within the recipe also helps, but at the end of the day school kids won't eat them.

Although the school lunch reformers Ed talks to retain their optimism, I wonder. If kids are used to snacks, and they're living in a society which gives them the right to say what they like and which honors their decisions, what's the use? Maybe in 10 years or so the foodies will have evolved a set of recipes which are nutritious, cheap, and eaten by kids. But maybe not.

 I  remember (vaguely) my own school days.  We had a kitchen where the food was prepared.  The cooks were neighbors, sometimes mothers. The food was standard 1950's fare, meat loaf, liver, etc. Almost all the time I carried my lunch--a sandwich, fruit, maybe carrots, and milk. So I don't remember how much choice you had in the cafeteria, but my impression is: very little.  Adults had authority and you took what you were served.

Unless and until we're willing and able to deprive kids of their "right to choose", I'm afraid the school lunch people are rolling a rock uphill.

No Bird Brains Here

Don't know how they did it, but this article (hat tip Ann Althouse) says birds can distinguish between wheat that's conventionally grown and wheat that's organically grown.  And, wait for it, they prefer the conventional, apparently because it has more protein.

I'm a bit skeptical--wheat strikes me as a crop where growing it organically isn't much different than conventional, but we need to trust the wisdom of our feathered friends.

Extension Service in New York City

The Times has an article on an extension specialist who retired in March. Turns out he's the father of urban farming, at least in NYC and at least over the last 35 years:

You have most likely never heard of Mr. Ameroso. Yet from a rubble-strewn vacant lot in Brooklyn where he showed New Yorkers how to grow food in 1976 to a three-acre stretch of Governors Island that he’s helping to sow now, he has been behind nearly every organized attempt to grow and sell food in the city, as well as many of the city’s best-known food organizations.

He was New York City’s first extension agent focused on farming, and now probably its last one. Mr. Ameroso formally retired in March and will spend the 2010 growing season removing himself from the daily work of city farms and making sure his colleagues — many of whom he’s trained — can carry on without him.

Extension started to help farmers improve their farming methods, taking advantage of research at the land-grant institutions.  It expanded to include homemakers, demonstrating canning techniques, teaching nutrition, etc. IMHO it reflects the Progressive impulse to teach and organize, improving things by using reason. Now, as one can see at extension.org  it takes on a much wider scope of problems--aging, caregiving, psychology, management, etc.  As indicated in the Times piece, there was an attempt to extend extension's reach into the city.  While many in the city could have benefited by the advice and information now available, serving urban needs hasn't been a success.  There's the isolated cases as described by the Times, but extension never figured out how to fill urban needs in a way which would cause urban politicians to support appropriations for extension.  It could be a case study in the limitations of organizational flexibility: in the case of extension you could take the extension worker out of the country, but not the country out of the organization.

Mongolian Locavores

David Lawrence has an interesting post on Mongolian diets (so heavy on the meat his family almost starved its hired help) at PSD--World Bank.

I wonder how obese Mongolians are, but at least they're following Michael Pollan's rules about what a good diet is: something your grandmother would prepare.

The Old Familiar Story: Surpluses in Agriculture (Pot This Time)

Via Ann Althouse, here's an NPR story on a crash in marijuana prices in California.  Seems there's an oversupply of field-grown pot; buyers prefer the indoor stuff.  It ends, as other farm stories have ended over the decades:

"California's pot economy is transforming, and it's starting to resemble a real commodities market where only big players can compete. It's a shift that could leave some growers in the dust."

AFTERTHOUGHT: This is also a case where consumers presumably prefer the product of industrialized ag over natural field grown stuff.

Best Sentence of May 18

"As long as there is snow up there we will have wind. "

From a post at Life on a Colorado Farm, talking about the state of the crops and the mountains which surround the farm.  Don't know why I like it so much--is it iambic pentameter? It's good science, if I remember my college geology 101. It's good philosophy for a farmer--you can't control the weather, you just live with it. Anyhow, I recommend the post and the site.  (Though, to be frank, the author's photographs gain from the topography whereas the Cotton Wife's photos gain nothing from Virginian topography but lots from cute red headed kids.)

There's Always Something, Even in Quantum Cryptography

Technology Review has a post on the ways errors in practice might create loopholes in quantum cryptography:

When it comes to secure messaging, nothing beats quantum cryptography, a method that offers perfect security. Messages sent in this way can never be cracked by an eavesdropper, no matter how powerful.
At least, that's the theory.

Actually, I was also bemused by the fact someone is actually creating and selling quantum cryptographic systems.  My grasp of modern physics ceased with the old solar system model of the atom, with the orbiting electrons.  Quanta and strings are a couple generations beyond me.

The Very Model of a Superior Social Security Bureaucrat

Via Volokh Conspiracy, a profile of the head of the Social Security Administration. The last lines quoted from his poem "Cancer Prayer" remind me of Walt Whitman's poem, Dressing the Wounds, which my wife and I heard put to music by John Adams at the Kennedy Center last night.  There is a time to welcome death.

Terrorists and Miranda

Back in the Bush administration there was a flap related to the Army's publishing of its manual on interrogation techniques.  Some argued it was wrong to described permitted and prohibited methods in detail, because it would enable terrorist organizations to train their members to resist interrogation.  That seems to make sense: we can't exaggerate how wily and tricky these terrorist networks are.

But if that makes sense, then surely there's no need to modify the Miranda warning and law with regard to U.S.  citizens and residents.  Any smart terrorist organization understands that these people have rights under the Constitution, rights which aren't dependent on the Miranda warning.  Any libertarian will tell you there's no obligation to say anything to a law enforcement officer.  So smart organizations will train their US citizen recruits in their constitutional rights, and modifying the warning will do nothing.

So there's a choice: believe in smart terrorist organizations and don't change Miranda; or, believe terrorist organizations are less than smart, that Murphy's Law operates there as well as elsewhere,  and the terrorist threat becomes too small to warrant any changes.

Farmers Markets Are Inefficient

That's a reality recognized in this post at Ethicurean.  Adam Smith recognized the virtues of specialization, but farmers' markets make the farmer be good at both growing and selling.  A farmer who has to spend much of the summer standing in a stall at a market is prevented from growing as much as she can.  Granted some select farmers can attract enthusiastic interns who can fill in, but it's not a formula that works for growing that sector of the agricultural economy.

A Symptom of the Times in USDA Succession

Here's a post on the new order of succession at USDA. In old days this was more important, since people worried about nuclear war.  These days the order is more symbolic.  I don't remember the exact order, but the Under Secretary over FSA and FAS used to be up there.  No more--he's now next to last among the under secretaries.

EWG Subsidy Database and the Farm Bill

The Environmental Working Group is knocking USDA for failing to provide farm program payment data tied to individuals when the checks were written to entities.  Seems USDA is estimating it would cost a bunch of money ($6.7 million) and Congress changed the law so they don't have to.  I'm not a real fan of EWG, I didn't like it back in the last century when they won their court case to get the payment data, but seems to me they're in the right here. Given Obama's emphasis on transparency, it's going to be difficult for the ag committees to hold the line on this one.

Us and the Brits--Transition and Budgets

There's been a little comment in the blogosphere on the transition in Britain. Took a day or two to come up with a coalition government, but now the Brits have all their cabinet in place and beavering away--no long drawn out confirmation hearings and the occasional embarrassing disclosures for the British. That's just a piece with the other ways in which their government differs from ours. I found this in a writeup on the British budget approval process:

The British Parliament has no ways and means committees, no budget committees, no appropriations committees. The committees that do scrutinize government departments lack the power to authorize new government programs and spending. Britain has one dominant figure who controls most of these functions: the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Roughly speaking, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the Treasury/Finance Minister for the British Government, yet he has unparalleled power compared to the US Treasury Secretary.

The Chancellor has sole responsibility for setting tax rates. He does not preside over a tax committee. Rather he makes all of his tax decisions in an annual statement to Parliament, which is referred to as the annual Budget Statement. In essence, the Chancellor is a one-man Ways & Means Committee. The Budget Statement he presents (discussed below in greater detail) outlines not only tax rates, but also the total amount of money that will be spent on all government activities (both mandatory and discretionary).

Thus, the Chancellor is also a one-man Budget Committee.

If I understand, the finances and spending bills get considered and there's the possibility for change, except if the government doesn't agree to the change, they can make it a vote of confidence and win that way. 

Rebound in Prince William County

Post had an article on Wednesday describing a rebound in Prince William county, VA. Schools are full and housing is moving.  That fits what I've noted on visits to my mother-in-law in Manassas Park--fewer "for sale" signs up for shorter times.

In my mind this is the way the real estate market revives: the new households formed, whether of immigrants who band together to finance a house, young people finally able to buy instead of rent, low-income households rising up the ladder, all find places where houses are affordable, as in Prince William.  They buy new houses and existing houses.  The owners of the existing houses then may have the money to finance a more expensive house, and so on up the ladder.  Instead of the "trickle-down" theory of wealth, this is the "build from the bottom" theory of housing prices.  (And it's one reason why I've still got the bee in my bonnet that the anti-immigrant fervor of 2005-7, as in Tom Tancredo, helped to pop the housing bubble.)

Anyhow, the future is looking a little brighter.

USDA Bureaucrat: Lyster Dewey and Hemp

The Post has an article on Lyster Dewey and his diaries, which record his work growing hemp, as well as other things, in the USDA gardens occupying the site where the Pentagon was built. USDA bureaucrats do many things.

Incidentally, during WWII the USDA also had a War Hemp program.  Find other links by googling "War Hemp".  I remember in the early 70's someone contacted the ASCS records people looking for the old records (I think the program was probably funded out of Commodity Credit Corporation funds.)

Equal Time for Cows--Predicting Their Behavior

Grew up on a dairy/poultry farm.  I've already posted on hens today, so I thought I'd throw in this piece from MIT on a model to predict cows' behavior: specifically whether to stand or lie down.

I'm a little skeptical of Bostonians talking about cows, they're probably more familiar with shoes.  But I can't controvert anything said in the post.

Hens and Cages

From Farm Policy

Rod Smith reported yesterday at Feedstuffs Online that, “American consumers buy eggs from cage housing systems by a margin of more than 40 to one over eggs from cage-free systems, according to data from Information Resources Inc. (IRI), which tracks checkout scanner transactions from 34,000 grocery and other retail stores in the U.S.
“Furthermore, based on other research, Americans pay three times less for eggs than Europeans do. Also, more than half of Americans prefer that egg producers continue to use current cage housing or migrate to alternative systems such as aviary or colony cages, and 44% prefer cage-free housing.

I wonder how it came to be that Americans pay three times less for eggs? Is the European poultry industry less concentrated?  Is it not vertically integrated as ours is? Do we just profit by the bigger market?  Do Europeans prefer more what in wine they call "terroir", which are the mostly imaginary qualities which are supposedly associated with production in a specific area.

[Updated--decided to do a little Googling and found this about the French industry.:]

National egg consumption over the last three to four years is estimated at 248 eggs per person on average, compared with 251 a decade ago.
Of these 248 eggs, 172 (69%) are believed to be table eggs, while the remaining 76 (31%) are thought to be processed eggs. Household purchases represent 40% of total consumption, followed by yolk and albumen (31%) for the food industry, table eggs for the catering sector (20%), and poultry farmers’ personal consumption (9%). Supermarket sales amount to nearly 4 billion eggs, or around one third of total consumption. Organic, Label Rouge and free-range eggs account for 28% of eggs sold and 42% of supermarkets’ turnover from egg sales. [I suspect here's a big difference.] France remains one of the EU’s biggest egg consumers.
The French egg market is at a crossroads in a fast-changing regulatory, economic and sanitary environment. While production and consumption perspectives remain favourable at international level, growth is slower in France and the rest of Europe, with a slight decline in production over the last few years.
The sector’s outlook depends on the development of EU-wide regulations concerning animal welfare, human health and the environment. The forthcoming ban on conventional cages, which is due to come into force on 1st January 2012, is expected to result in the further diversification of rearing systems and the development of alternative rearing methods, the ITAVI forecasts. In addition, growing awareness among consumers of animal welfare, as well as health and environmental issues, is likely to shape the market and benefit the organic sector.
The French poultry industry faces the tough challenge of adapting its production structures and making strategic investment choices over the next 20 years. However, the heavy costs involved may result in the disappearance of a number of small poultry farms, says ITAVI deputy manager Jean Champagne. Future production methods will have to guarantee human health and animal welfare as well as offer competitive prices, all the more so as the EU market is likely to be opened to imports from third countries that are not subject to the same requirements.