The Choice: Abortion or Farmers?

The question is why did the Republicans lose their runs for the Senate in Missouri and Indiana.  The pat answer inside the Beltway is "abortion", ill-advised remarks by the Republican candidates.  But  Farm Policy reports on a Politico piece on the possibility of Sen. Cochran taking the ranking member role in Senate Ag, which includes this:

"“Boehner’s stand may have cost Republicans at least one if not two Senate seats that the GOP had hoped to win in Great Plains states. And Roberts argued Tuesday that the leadership must take a second look now at the farm bill and its promised savings –a precious commodity given the fiscal pressures at the end of the year.”

Dairy in California

From today's Farm Policy quoting from a Wall Street Journal article:

“Some 100 California dairy farmers are shutting their doors this year, according to the Milk Producers Council, a group representing dairy farmers. Many of the state’s roughly 1,600 dairy farms are wrestling with financial difficulties. And many farmers point their finger at California’s ‘Class 4b’ milk regulation, which governs the prices cheese makers pay,” the Journal article said.

When I was growing up, the small poultrymen were being put out of business by vertical integration and contract growing.  I don't know what has happened to egg prices over the last 50 years, but I assume they've been more stable since supply has been more regulated/coordinated.  I guess that sort of revamping of the dairy industry isn't quite as practical: too much capital involved perhaps.

Anyhow, things continue to change.

Farm Bill Extension?

Chris Clayton reports Sen. Grassley is predicting a one-year extension.

Shirley Sherrod

I've a hold on Shirley Sherrod's new book [at the library], but here's a brief review.

[Updated]

The Progress of New Terminology and Technology

Reading Notice CP-686 on the forthcoming use of MIDAS with GIS for acreage reporting, replacing CARS. 

Two terms new to me: "subfield" and "cross-over commodity".

Remembering the fiasco of the ASCS-578 in 1985 (and 86, and 87) I wish them luck.  Actually, I hope over the years the number of problems has been reduced, but acreage reporting was probably the  area where the conflict between national standards and local conditions was most obvious. Before computers, much of the conflict was hidden from the national office; State and county offices made things work.  Introduce the computer and local variation becomes a problem.

I suspect, without any evidence whatsoever, that part of the resistance to "electronic health records" on the part of doctors and others is based on this sort of thing. 

You Are There

Something reminded me of the old radio program "You Are There" (late 40's).  It featured recreations of famous events in history, narrated by an announcer.  The one I particularly remember was the signing of the Magna Charta, with the announcer talking about the angry barons and building the tension over whether King John would sign or fight.

Anyway, turns out the tapes of that program are available online (why am I surprised). The list of all the programs is revealing: almost nothing after 1900, a couple on women's rights, almost nothing on civil rights, and some oddities, at least by today's standards:  The Trial of Samuel Chase? (A justice impeached but acquitted in 1804/5)

I guess it was radio's equivalent of today's History Channel.

You Never Do It Right the First Time: ORCA

That's my motto, and it seems the Romney campaign didn't heed it.  By keeping their ORCA centralized data system under wraps until late, and not giving it a test run, it collapsed and burned on election day.

Not covered in the story: I'm intrigued by their decision to do a centralized effort, as opposed to a 50-state effort.  Seems like the sort of thing Republicans accused us bureaucrats of, believing in the wisdom of the central government.  In this case, at least, the community organizer outdid the business executive.

[Update: Fairfax county school system installed a new math system this fall, with online books, which is causing problems.  Apparently they decided not to do a pilot, based on past successes with other subjects.]

Call Me Stick-in-the-Mud

I have to admit a shameful fact: I don't own a mobile device, no iPhone or iPad or Android or anything.When you stay as close to home as I do, there's not that much point.  In other words, if you're not mobile, you don't need a mobile device.

Margaret Chase Smith Is Happy

20 women senators in the new Congress, she was the only one when I became conscious of politics.

Thank Goodness Washington's Not Battleground

I see the great bureaucrats in Washington state have now succeeded in counting 58 percent of their ballots. 

My Own Prediction

Nate Silver's book will hit the NYTimes best seller list.  (I'm about a third through and it's very good.)

Voting

Voted about 1:45.  Took about 30 minutes.  The line was wrong [sic], but I can't say it was the longest ever, but possibly it was.  Memory fades.  They used both touch screen and paper ballots. Unfortunately people irrationally choose the touch screen so there was a 10 minute wait for those, while if you were smart enough, I wasn't, to vote paper there was no wait after your eligibility had been confirmed.

[Updated to note my freudian slip.]

The Value of Female Leaders?

Apparently Bangladesh has been doing quite well over the last 20 years, during which they've had mostly female prime ministers.

The Distraction of Politics

Election day tomorrow.  I'm voting for Obama, Kaine (Senate) and Connelly (House).  Does it make a difference?  From the perspective of 71 years, and probably 64 or so following politics (don't ask why the early interest) I'd say it does and it doesn't. The bottom line is that the country is like a big ocean liner with lots of momentum and we tend to overestimate the influence of our elected officials.  It's rather like ASCS/FSA, very hard to make significant changes in the culture and organization.  

Many Varieties of Federal Employees

Sarah Kliff at the Post reminds of the varieties of Federal employees.

"FEMA has 9,106 disaster assistance employees. Only 770 get federal health insurance."

The point is that FEMA uses "reservists" who are temporary employees and not eligible for FEHBP for most of its disaster response.  It's rather like the Forest Service which has a similar deal for its firefighters.  And FSA/ASCS which used to have a big slug of temporary field employees for summer compliance work.  And the other variety is, of course, the county office employees who aren't technically Federal for some purposes, meaning they're usually excluded in counts of federal employees.

Disasters, Climbing Mountains, and the Poor

I'm not a mountain climber, but it seems it me mountain climbing is a good metaphor for being poor, and disasters.

Imagine a big high mountain and the game of life is to try to climb it.  The mountain has various nooks and crannies, easier routes and harder routes, and most of all it has a lot of loose stones, so it's very easy for a climber to dislodge a stone which falls, sometimes triggering more rock falls.  Now where you start on the mountain is a matter of luck, your ancestors and your inheritance.  Some people just find a cranny near their starting point and rest there.  Others are able to make mad sprints up an easy route. But most people toil away at whatever level they're at on the mountain.

Unfortunately, as they toil they knock the stones off, the stones go bouncing down the side and they can hit the people below, knocking them backwards down the mountain.

The poor are at the lowest levels of the mountain and therefore have the longest climb and face the most stones falling down.  That's life, that's unfair, that's disaster.

Thinking of filing insurance claims for damage caused by Sandy, that assumes people have insurance.  But the poor are less likely to have insurance, that's a luxury you can't afford  Lose all the food in your refrigerator; that's particularly hard if your food budget is tight.  Lose the car to the flooding, unlikely to have comprehensive insurance.  Have the apartment flooded, no renters insurance. The local restaurant is flooded, lose weeks of work as dishwasher or waiter until it gets going again.

Robo Call to Vets: Poor Research

Somehow the opponent of my Representative (or someone backing him) discovered I'm a vet, so I got a robo-call this noon alerting me to something despicable Mr. Connelly had said about the military.  Guess their research didn't find out how firmly committed to the Dems I am.

The Scarcity of Gardeners

The Times has an interesting piece today on the scarcity of urban gardeners, at least in certain parts of New York City. The writer visits a number of the urban gardens in the city and interviews a number of the gardeners and others, including a retired urban extension worker from Cornell.  The pattern seems to be that some gardens thrive, others fall into disuse, partially depending on the surrounding area and partially depending on the interest and energy of a dedicated gardener. 

But John Ameroso, the Johnny Appleseed of the New York community garden movement, suspects that the number of present-day gardens — around 800 — may be half what it was in the mid-1980s.

In his long career as an urban extension agent for Cornell University, Mr. Ameroso, 67, kept a log with ratings of all the plots he visited. “I remember that there were a lot of gardens that were not in use or minimally used,” he said. “Into the later ’80s, a lot of these disappeared or were abandoned. Or maybe there was one person working them. If nothing was developed on them, they just got overgrown.”

Seems to me the article undermines any assumption there's a long waiting list for urban garden plots in the city, some areas have waiting lists, some don't. The enthusiasm for gardening is similar to other enthusiasms, sometimes hot, sometimes cold.  It's not a firm foundation for redoing the basis on which America grows its food.

(In my own community garden in Reston, there is a waiting list.  Reston has expanded the area in which I garden twice now.  But Restonites are likely to be enthusiastic, at least enough of them to fill a waiting list.  We're a cosmopolitan bunch, Korea, Vietnam, Africa, Latino, some probably suffering from nostalgia for their childhood, like me, and some falling prey to the current fad.)

Understatement of the Day

Emily Hauser is anxious (Sandy and elections).  She writes: "...I want him [Romney] to be a mensch and acknowledge that what this country needs is a second Obama term and announce that he’s throwing in the towel. And that’s not really a reasonable expectation."

You Can't Keep Vertical Farms Down

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution includes a link to this piece on a vertical farm in Singapore. I comment that I don't think it's economically feasible.

Dairy and Evolution

Via Marginal Revolution, a very interesting Slate piece on the evolution of lactase-tolerance.  An excerpt:

Milk, by itself, somehow saved lives. This is odd, because milk is just food, just one source of nutrients and calories among many others. It's not medicine. But there was a time in human history when our diet and environment conspired to create conditions that mimicked those of a disease epidemic. Milk, in such circumstances, may well have performed the function of a life-saving drug.

You can't be a dairy farmer and deny evolution.

Blitzkreig, Via Horses

Brad DeLong has regular posts on the progress of WWII.   In 1942 Stalingrad was the big battle, indeed the turning point of the war.  He includes this:

"6th Army also sends back its 150,000 draft horses, as well as oxen and camels, back to the rear, to save on fodder. Motor transport and repair units are also sent back behind the Don."

The Iowa State Nearly Organic Study

Mr. Bittman discusses a 9-year Iowa State study of organic agriculture in Sunday's Times (I'm just getting caught up with my reading).

From the abstract: we conducted a field study from 2003–2011 in Iowa that included three contrasting systems varying in length of crop sequence and inputs. We compared a conventionally managed 2-yr rotation (maize-soybean) that received fertilizers and herbicides at rates comparable to those used on nearby farms with two more diverse cropping systems: a 3-yr rotation (maize-soybean-small grain + red clover) and a 4-yr rotation (maize-soybean-small grain + alfalfa-alfalfa) managed with lower synthetic N fertilizer and herbicide inputs and periodic applications of cattle manure. Grain yields, mass of harvested products, and profit in the more diverse systems were similar to, or greater than, those in the conventional system, despite reductions of agrichemical inputs. Weeds were suppressed effectively in all systems, but freshwater toxicity of the more diverse systems was two orders of magnitude lower than in the conventional system. Results of our study indicate that more diverse cropping systems can use small amounts of synthetic agrichemical inputs as powerful tools with which to tune, rather than drive, agroecosystem performance, while meeting or exceeding the performance of less diverse systems.

So it wasn't "organic"in the pure sense. And that raises a question: currently "organic" food gets a significant price premium.  Is it possible for "nearly organic" food to get a price premium? (A quick skim of the report says they didn't assume higher prices for outputs of the alternative systems.) Is it possible to rally public support for farm programs helping "nearly organic" farmers?

I renew my question from previous such studies: where is the market for the increased production of alfalfa?

Basalt Rebar

Walter Jeffries is using basalt rebar  in his butcher shop, which progresses apace.  For some reason that blows my mind, I'm not sure why. Maybe because I think of basalt as a rock, a solid, not as something which once was liquid and could be liquidified again.

See the site here.  I note the local supermarket has stanchions (upside down U's) to keep their carts nearby, and some of the stanchions have rusted where it goes into the concrete.

Gravity: There's Always a Catch

Technology Review has a piece on 3-D printing. It seems some people who try to use 3-D printing to make physical models of their fancy designs forget something.

"Sometimes, after an outlandish request—a character whose minuscule limbs simply won’t support a body, say—Carmy’s colleagues have to gently explain that different rules exist for physical product design. “We have gravity, for example,” she says."

The Importance of Crop Insurance

In the US the insurers have a video on loss adjustment.

In Ghana, Chris Blattman passes along the conclusion of an academic paper on crop insurance for those farmers.

Early Voting: the Evolution of the Ground Game

I'm down in the records as a reliable Democratic vote.  (Read The Victory Lab for an interesting take on how well the experts can track and manipulate such data.)  So usually I get a call during Election Day to be sure I've voted, perhaps a call or two before to be sure I'm planning to vote.  This year for the first time I got a call nudging me to early vote.  Virginia's rules on early voting are more restrictive than other states, though there are enough exceptions that I could perhaps fit through one of them. The advantage of early voting for the campaign is they'll know when I've voted (that's a public record), so they can scratch me off their list and focus their efforts on others.

That logic and effort is sort of reflected in this Mark Halprin piece on Obama's ground game (hat tip Volokh Conspiracy) and this Molly Ball piece in Atlantic.

[Updated with the last link.]

Super User Boot Camp and the History of Training

There was a super-user boot camp for MIDAS last week.  Some 60 super-users were trained on it.  Apparently the Deputy Administrator was opening the session, because the website shows a picture of him, but the associated link points back to the Administrator's message of August.

I'm a bit curious as to the setup--whether this is train-the-trainer?  When I moved to the program side, the standard for training was: Washington program specialist trained state program specialist who trained the county CED's and PA's.  That's the way we trained for the System/36, though the "program specialists" were mostly the people hired out of the county office to work in DC (today's business process analysts, I think).  As time went on we became more sophisticated in training; we even did dry runs instead of just winging it in front of the audience.  With the advent of PC's and Word Perfect our materials could be a lot prettier, though perhaps not much improved in quality.

By the early 90's we were providing our presentations on floppy disks to the state people.  And then we started to train the trainers; rather than just relying on the state specialists, we'd pull in selected county people and mix up the areas.  The theory was in part to spread the training burden, in part to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas at the county level, rather than having 50 silos of county to state communication where the major cross-fertilization occurred at the state level.  I don't remember ever doing a detailed evaluation of our methods, to see whether we really did improve county operations through such training methods.

These days, with social media, and bring your own device, I'm sure there are new possibilities for improving training.

Snarky Harvard Prof--British Cooking

Chris Blattman quotes from a British research paper showing the benefits of eating fruits and vegetables.  His only addition is this sentence:

"Just imagine the happiness effect if the vegetables had not been cooked by the British."

Obama and Bayonets

Our President seemed to diss bayonets last night in the debate.  I still have memories of bayonet practice in basic training: "kill", "kill", "kill". 

But just to show that bayonets are not entirely obsolete, here's a picture showing the place they enjoy in today's Air Force:

From the USA.gov site.

How the Point Zero Zero Zero Ones Live

My wife and I visited the Rockefellers Friday, more specifically took the tour of Kykuit.  Over the years we've visited the homes of the  Vanderbilts, the Ogden Mills, the Roosevelts,and other formerly rich and famous people who lived a few weeks in the year in the Hudson River valley.

Rockefeller and Vanderbilt rank 1, 2 on this list of the wealthiest Americans.  While both places are large and nice, I was more at home in Sunnyside, the relatively modest home of Washington Irving.  Perhaps it was the crumbled paper on the floor of his office/writing room, perhaps it was the way he got hot water, by running pipes through the coal stove and into a tank, much the same way my family got its hot water some 100 years later. 

All these houses seem stuck in time; they were very modern in their day but as time passed and their owners aged, and sometimes lost their money, they weren't updated.  I wonder whether Bill Gates will leave his house to the nation upon his death, and whether it will still have the flat screens on the walls displaying the pictures/photographs he bought (I'm going on memory here) and whether people will experience a mix of emotions as they tour, both respect for the money and disdain for the backwardness of the taste.

It's All Power--per Pollan

From the NY Times Magazine, Prof. Pollan writes on the referendum in California to require the labeling of food with genetically modified organisms as ingredients.

This paragraph I found astonishing, but remember that the good professor is not one of my favorite people (for some reason he and Ralph Reed get up my nose, as the Brits would say);

Americans have been eating genetically engineered food for 18 years, and as supporters of the technology are quick to point out, we don’t seem to be dropping like flies. But they miss the point. The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends.

Am I being unfair to summarize it as saying: "it's not a health issue, it's power"--even though there's no food safety issue, we, the food movement, need to show our power?  Would the professor like to see other movements use the same logic; don't argue the merits, just show you're more powerful than your opponent?

Hiatus

Laptop went down, a trip is coming up, things generally disordered so blogging may/will suffer.

That Food We Waste--the Cows Eat It?

CNN has a report on farmers feeding candy to their cows, given the high price of grain.  They play it for laughs, but the main stream media and food movement have made a big deal out of all the food we waste.  I wonder how much of it, particularly from supermarkets, ends up in pigs and cows?

I know a couple of bloggers who raise pigs who feed such things (mostly dairy-oriented, like butter milk etc.).  Does that constitute waste in the statistical business?  I suspect probably it does, but am not sure.  Does it constitute real waste--not to me.

The Case of Powerline's Missing Archives

I follow Powerline, though it's often not good for my blood pressure, though Paul Mirengoff, now he's back, is sometimes good.  I was trying to figure out what they were saying 4 years ago, only to find a big hole in their blog archives: no posts for May - November 2008. Could just be a technical problem, or it could be they don't want people to know what they were saying?

FAO: Whoops, We Were Off

The UN's Food and Argiculture Organization has revised its estimates from its previous 1 billion down to 870 million.  From their new report:

About 870 million people are estimated to have been undernourished in the period 2010–12. This represents 12.5 percent of the global population, or one in eight people. The vast majority of these – 852 million – live in developing countries, where the prevalence of undernourishment is now estimated at 14.9 percent of the population (Figure, below left). Undernourishment in the world is unacceptably high.The updated figures emerging as a result of improvements in data and the methodology FAO uses to calculate its undernourishment indicator suggest that the number of undernourished people in the world declined more steeply than previously estimated until 2007, although the rate of decline has slowed thereafter(Figure, below left). As a result, the developing world as a whole is much closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of reducing by half the percentage of people suffering from chronic hunger by 2015. If the average annual decline of the past 20 years continues through to 2015, the prevalence of undernourishment in the developing country regions would reach 12.5 percent – still above the MDG target, but much closer to it than previously estimated

SSA, FSA, and Internet Operations

The Post's Federal Page reports a controversy between Social Security Administration and its union, a controversy which may prefigure similar tensions between FSA and its employees.  (SSA is usually considered to have done well in use of the Internet.)

Witold Skwierczynski, president of the National Council of SSA Field Operations Locals, part of the American Federation of Government Employees, sent a letter to the SSA demanding “to bargain over the impact and implementation of the Agency’s decision to shorten the hours field office employees interview the public.”
The letter said that “the Union disagrees with the Agency’s position that most services do not require a field office visit and can be done on the Internet or by the 800 Number.

And Conservatives Wonder Why I Don't Trust the Big Shots

Jack Welch, ex-CEO of GE, and guru of business, has accused the bureaucrats in the Bureau of Labor Statistics of cooking the most recent unemployment rate. 

Prof. Andrew Gelman at the Monkey Cage  reports on an investigation of the integrity of statistics in GE when Mr. Welch was its head.  Seems GE paid a $50 million fine to SEC for accounting fraud.  The graph of earnings under Welch and under his successor is damning in and of itself.

Our Fighters Are Fat

From Tom Ricks  The Best Defense:

At present, 62 percent of active duty military members over the age of 20 have a body mass index that falls into either the overweight or obese category.

 My title is, I hope, unfair.  I'd assume the 62 percent REMF's or FOBBITS, part of the "tail" supporting the fighters, and we have a bigger tail than ever.

And Gov. Romney wants to spend more money on the military? If he wins, I hope a good bit of it is with Weight Watchers.

(Have I ever mentioned that my worst prejudice, the one I have least under control, is probably weightism?)

Romney Ignores Crop Insurance

Here's Gov. Romney position paper on agriculture (reached via Chris Clayton)--I searched for "insurance" and came up empty, searched for "payment" and came up empty. He wants "energy independence", "rational regulation" "new markets" and "reasonable taxation",

In fairness I should note I didn't check Obama's campaign, but by necessity he's been a bit more specific.  And at least Mitt doesn't lump USDA in with Big Bird.

The 8 Inch Floppy

Govloop has this post, with a very young Bill Gates balancing a floppy disk on his finger.  When I first saw it, I thought it was an 8 incher, but it's more likely a 5 1/4 one.  As an 8 incher, it brought back memories of the IBM System/36, the minicomputer which ASCS used to automate its operations. 

(Going even further back, in the early 70's there was a pilot project to put remote terminals in county offices.  The storage at that time was an IBM 7.5 meg disk drive.)

NYTimes

Had an article on school kids and their problems with the new school lunch rules (more fruits and vegetables, fewer calories).  The complaints seem to go in two directions: not enough food (calories), we're still hungry; and too much food we don't like.

This struck me as a bit optimistic:

But the most effective strategy, several food service directors said, may simply be waiting. Research shows that children must be exposed to vegetables 10 to 12 times before they will eat them on their own, said William J. McCarthy, a professor of public health and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Our Forebears Were Restrained in Bed and in Comments?

Boston 1775 now has a series of four posts on "bundling", with this the latest.
He calls it "flaming" and it's about right.

Surprising Unsurprising Fact

Or is it "unsurprising surprising fact"?  Maybe the latter, given the evidence for widening inequality in income/wealth in the nation.  Anyhow, Peter Orszag writes:

In 1990, 20-year-old white women who had at least a college degree were expected to live to age 81, while those with less than a high-school degree were expected to reach 79, a recent study in Health Affairs found. By 2008, however, that two-year gap had widened to more than 10 years. For 20-year-old white men, the difference grew from five years in 1990 to 13 years in 2008.

It's part of a discussion on how the gap affects discussion of entitlement reform:arguing for greater progressivity in any reform of Social Security and Medicare/medicaid reform to offset the gap.  He's not particularly focused on causes, mentioning smoking and the effects of education.

GMO Corn and Unanticipated Consequences

Farming is always complex, and modern technology has its own surprises.

This farmgate post discusses some consequences of the drought: herbicide carryover, because the herbicide is activated by rain/moisture (who knew, not I), and volunteer corn which should be killed before wheat is planted, but it's herbicide resistant (drought meant smaller kernels which went through the combine and back on the ground).

Family Farm

I like this piece in the Atlantic, written by a person who grew up on the family farm in Alberta, but who is no longer allowed to operate the equipment:

"My dad farms 3,200 acres of his own, and rents another 2,400—all told, a territory seven times the size of Central Park. Last year, he produced 3,900 tonnes (or metric tons) of wheat, 2,500 tonnes of canola, and 1,400 tonnes of barley. (That’s enough to produce 13 million loaves of bread, 1.2 million liters of vegetable oil, and 40,000 barrels of beer.) His revenue last year was more than $2 million, and he admits to having made “a good profit,” but won’t reveal more than that. The farm has just three workers, my dad and his two hired men, who farm with him nine months of the year. For the two or three weeks of seeding and harvest, my dad usually hires a few friends to help out, too.

Harvard Disappoints

Harvard recognizing for 2012  100+ innovations in government.  It's disappointing because probably half of the listings have no url.  Come on, get real.

Technology and Dairy: the Use of Cellphones

Almost forgot to link to this post on the benefits of cellphones for the dairy farmer: when the cows get out and get lost you can coordinate your search and driving efforts using cellphones. :-)

Of course these days the number of dairies putting cows out to pasture is dwindling, but every bit helps.  ("Threecollie", who runs the site, also uses a birder app on her iPHone.)

The Making of a Myth: Apple Maps

Some ideas get transformed into myths, which seems to be happening in the case of Apple Maps.  Consumer Reports did a comparison of the Apple application with Google Maps and GPS and said Apple's version wasn't bad and had some nice features.  But such a lukewarm review can't stand up against the incessantly repeated statement that Apple screwed up.

By contrast, Apple's Siri was hailed on its release as great.  My impression is that continued use of it revealed it wasn't all that good, perhaps much like Maps.

Technology and Dairy Flourish in Small Countries?

The NYTimes has a piece on a technology test in Switzerland: managers of dairy herds can be notified by text if their cows are in heat (based on temperature of vulva and cow activity). (For those benighted souls reading this who never grew up on a dairy farm: you have to inseminate the cow within x hours of when she comes in heat.  If you don't catch her heat, or she fails to become pregnant, you're facing a month of payments for feed that's pure waste, except of course for the cow.) The story says it's harder to tell when a cow is in heat with modern dairy cows. Without challenging that assertion, I'd suggest the high ratio of cows to people in modern dairies also makes it more difficult.

I do wonder if down the line PETA will protest this mistreatment of cows. 

Another development on the technology front is the modification of bovine genetics so their milk is less likely to trigger allergies. Interesting that the development comes from New Zealand.  I wonder about the level of anti-science feeling there.