Google Reader and Blogging

I follow a lot of blogs, often using them as the basis for posts. Now I'm going to try Google Reader's sharing feature. Hold your breath

Specious Arguing on Farm Bill Effects

Grist has this post by Britt Lundgren, on the faults of the farm bill and what changes should be made. Without addressing all of the points, I'd like to focus on the flaws in this excerpt, flaws which are recurrent in the green/locavore critique of farm policy:

Much of the debate over Farm Bill reform centers on spending priorities. According to the Environmental Working Group's Farm Subsidy Database, 10 percent of the beneficiaries of commodity subsidies received 66 percent of all the money spent on subsidies between 2003 and 2005. Because 6 out of 10 farmers don't get any subsidies at all (they grow vegetables, fruits, nuts or other crops that aren't eligible for subsidies), this means that during this period, just a tiny fraction of the farmers in the US collected over $22 billion in payments. Despite all of the money we pour into farm subsidies, most small and medium-sized farmers are still struggling to make ends meet.

[give Lundgren credit for not throwing in an attack on corporate agriculture, which people often include here--contrasting small farmers with corporate farms.]

Okay, farmers who plant and harvest a bigger acreage of field crops get the bigger share of the dollars. But the argument is unclear--should we subsidize the small and medium-sized farmers of all crops and not the large? Who is a farmer? Most farmers get off-the-farm income. Most small farmers operate at a loss. Back in Kentucky in the 1980's around Lexington, IBM was building up its printer operation, later sold off as Lexmark. We had tobacco farms subdivided into 5 acre lots to accommodate the houses the IBM executives were putting up. They still had farmland, they owned farmland, but were they farmers? (They might well be included as farmers in some reports.)

Presumably we shouldn't be interested in subsidizing the 16% of farmers who are "lifestyle" farmers (those Lexmark executives, or the Barbara Kinsolvings of the world), nor the 16% who are "retirement" farmers. Clearly M. Lundgren doesn't want to subsidize the 2.2% of nonfamily farms (might be run by corporations, universities or monasteries, or whatever) or the 8.2 percent of large and very large family farms. That leaves about 10% limited resource and 25% small family farms as the target group.

Unfortunately for Lundgren, the lifestyle and retirement farmers are exactly the people who disproportionately receive conservation payments. The big farmers need their $4,000 an acre land to grow crops, not conservation uses. And the limited resource and small family farms also need their land for farming.

And the corporate farmers? They're disproportionately found growing stuff that's not subsidized: fruits and vegetables, "other livestock". Any implication that we should shift the focus of farm programs from big field crop farmers to growers of fruits and vegetables would have us subsidize corporate agriculture. (Of course, I recognize Lundgren and those who share these opinions don't want that. The problem is they, we all, argue based on assumptions and pretty ideas in our heads, not on the facts.

Source of all this info -- ERS publication. Recommended

Size and Scale

Megan McArdle has a good post on the problems of moving from a pilot program to production. In a way, it goes against my mantra: "you never do things right the first time". Maybe I need to adopt a corollary: "but if you do, you were lucky and your luck is going to run out in production."

Open Government--Judicial Branch

I'm a bit cynical about the open government effort and the "portal". (Who needs a portal when you've got Google?) But Congress is working on extending the CIO authority and even includes a requirement that judicial opinions be online. One and one-half cheers.

Organic Ag versus Industrial Ag: Greater Productivity?

Tom Philpott at Grist highlights an Iowa State study that showed greater productivity over 9 years from organic crop rotations as opposed to industrial ag cropping.

Although that's major news, and noteworthy, it doesn't prove what Tom wants it to prove. For organic ag to feed the world, replacing industrial ag, you don't need to prove that, acre for acre, organic is of equal productivity in a given year. You need to prove it over a course of years. In other words, organic ag rests on the idea of crop rotation. Corn one year, soybeans the next, maybe alfalfa years 3-5, then corn again. So over 10 years, the total production of the acre is 2 years worth of corn, 2 years worth of soybeans, and 6 years worth of something else. For industrial ag, it might be 5 years corn, 5 years soybeans, or even 7 years corn, 3 soybeans.

Oh for the Good Old Days

Farm bill consideration is stuck in the Senate. In the good old days (i.e., 1985) there was some leverage the executive branch could use on the Congress--threaten to implement the permanent provisions of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. Technically each successive farm bill suspended the operation of those provisions (for wheat marketing quotas, most notably) so when we got to a new crop year (i.e., the 2008 crop year for wheat has now begun, in that wheat has been planted) the old provisions were in effect.

Unfortunately, through a combination of causes, that leverage has evaporated. For one, because the farm program is basically decoupled from the production of a crop (as required by the WTO) farmers don't complain as much about not knowing program provisions before they make planting decisions.

Assumptions Will Kill You Every Time

The Project on Government Oversight cites an AP report on new helicopters for the Army. They were designed in Europe and have a slight problem: the AC can't cool the chopper enough on hot days, which means it shuts down. I suspect, on no basis whatever, that the European designers just assumed that their climate was normal, forgetting it gets hotter in the U.S.

Effective Management?

According to Government executive President Bush has issued an executive order on management. All sorts of good stuff, all except any recognition of other efforts, such as GPRA
(Government Performance and Results Act of 1993).

I suppose I'm just getting old and cynical, but if the government bureaucrats would spend less time managing performance and more time performing, we might all be better off.

Chinese Tomatoes

Slate's Arthur Allen on the interesting development of China as a major producer (but not eater) of tomatoes.

Privacy and the Government

I blithely surf the Internet, leaving bits and pieces of my identity here and there. A deputy to the Director of National Intelligence argues that therefore I should be comfortable with a loss of privacy vis a vis the government. I've some sympathy with the argument, but I disagree. Though I personally may be comfortable with trusting the government, most people aren't, so our systems need to recognize that.

I've no problem with the government gathering gobs of data to do their work. But many times the data doesn't have to be tied back to an individual. So the first rule is collect the data but lose the individual. In some cases you need the individual. The second rule should be, when the individual is tied to data, you log accesses and make the log available to the individual. In other words, I should be able to call up, via internet, the job description of any government employee who looks at my tax information, my health data, even my name and address.