Townshend introduced to England the four-field crop rotation pioneered by farmers in the Waasland region in the early 16th century. The system (wheat, barley, turnips and clover), opened up a fodder crop and grazing crop allowing livestock to be bred year-round, and increased productivity by avoiding leaving the soil uncultivated every third year. Previously, a three-year rotation was practiced by farmers in Europe with a rotation of rye or winter wheat, followed by spring oats or barley, then letting the soil rest (leaving it fallow) during the third stage. Crop rotation is necessary in order to avoid the build-up of crop-specific soil pests and diseases, and because different families of plant have varying nutritional requirements. The four-field crop rotation was a key development in the British Agricultural Revolution.I should also note the Mark Overton, BBC series, who ties this into organic and industrial farming.
Blogging on bureaucracy, organizations, USDA, agriculture programs, American history, the food movement, and other interests. Often contrarian, usually optimistic, sometimes didactic, occasionally funny, rarely wrong, always a nitpicker.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Brad DeLong and Turnip Townshend
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Obama Breaks His Promise Again
[Updated] See this politico post.
Flexible Leases and Definition of Producer
Given the long history of the provision, I'm wondering if there will be unanticipated effects. But, that's a question which the future will answer, I guess.
Government Web Sites--USDA Is Low
ACRE Confuses Even the EU
"Heralded as an innovative new risk management tool, ACRE is yet another countercyclical scheme, this time for revenue," the report highlights. "So it is business as usual in that the countercyclical nature of US farm support continues, with a bewildering array of schemes all addressing the same issues. For many observers it represents a significant step backwards in terms of agricultural policy."
See also Keith Good's FarmPolicy which puts this assessment in the broader context of challenges to free trade.
A Cloud on FSA Computers
Among the items that the Collins-Nelson initiative is targeting: $1.1 billion for comparative medical research, $350 million for Agriculture Department computers, $75 million to discourage smoking, $20 million in Interior Department funding, $400 million for HIV screening and $650 million for wildlife management.
[Updated} See this Government Executive piece as well.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Definition of a "Family Farm"
Well, it's become a House Divided, as the definition of what, exactly, a family farm is has come under increasing debate. We're talking economies of scale here: A 10,000 acre "family-owned farm" is profoundly different in its capitalization and where it sells crops, in the use of genetically engineered crops, machines, animal confinement, and energy than is, say, a three/four-hundred-acre family farm. A 10,000 acre family farm, despite being "owned" on paper by a single family, is actually Big Ag, when you parse it. NFU, under Buis's leadership, has increasingly leaned towards protecting the interests of huge family farms (thus protecting the interests of Big Ag), toward commodity programs, and has foregone its progressive history.IMO a family farm is defined as no more than 40 acres of cropland, owned by one family, and operated by one family, with minimal hired help and contracted services (like baling hay), located in upstate NY. More seriously, while a 10,000 acre farm is industrial agriculture, I could conceive it being a family farm, as in owned and operated by one nuclear family, or the families of two siblings.
Iraq Needed Bureaucrats
But What About Battleaxe?
Then again, sometimes animals earn names. (I wonder whether the piglets in this story got named, other than the expletives I'm sure Stonehead surpressed in writing it.) Which all reminds me of a cow we had named "Battleaxe". As one might expect, she didn't have a pleasant personality, nor was she particularly productive, but dad endured her for a few years, years which saw him educate his son in profanity.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Football Players Are Too Big
How about imposing a team weight limit--say set the cap at 95 percent of the weight of the average NFL team? Then you'd have judgment calls--do you keep your 350 pound nose tackle and cut your 280 pound middle linebacker or vice versa?
Just a thought. (The Ivy schools have a lightweight football league.)
Those Germans Loved Their Beer
Bureaucrats Are Not Liberals, or They Don't Listen to Radio
ACRE and Bureaucracy
Comments:I think the primary concern with ACRE is the administrative burden. Proving yields and keeping records straight at the FSA office could be a Herculean effort even for a 1,000 acre farm. And who wants to share all that proprietary information. And is there some ridiculous cross compliance between landowners? So if one little old lady bows out, your work is in vain?
Notice EQUIP with Tier 1, 2, 3 funding failed to launch for the same bureaucratic reasons. It just plain disappeared.
Maybe FSA finally did it, they developed a program so complex that even they don't understand it!
- note that these days a 1,000 acre farm leaps to the tongue as an example of a small farm. Just a generation ago Jane Smiley wrote her novel of that title as an example of a large farm, a kingdom even (she based her plot on King Lear).
- several comments to the post, all interesting, a couple on the challenge to FSA. Some confusion evident, and these are farmers who presumably should be the best informed. That's the FSA educational problem (although Illinois extension is sharing the burden, apparently). [Updated link]
- an observation about the intra-state differences in climate in ND, which makes the program work better for some farmers than others.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Sec. 1619 in Kansas
Bypassing Bureaucratic Rules--NYPD
Freed from the bureaucratic restraints of Washington, Cohen [ex-CIA man heading the shop] set about building his 600-person unit with astonishing speed and efficiency, infuriating former federal colleagues along the way. In no time, he had twice as many fluent Arabic speakers on his staff as in the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation. His agents speak some 50 languages and dialects in all, which matches the reported linguistic capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency.The book is: SECURING THE CITY Inside America's Best Counterterror Force -- the NYPD By Christopher Dickey.
But there's also this:
"Dickey might have dug a little deeper in addressing the persistent but vague allegations in Washington that the NYPD counterterrorism unit cuts legal corners and that some of its methods are unconstitutional. "They do stuff that would get us arrested," says one three-letter guy."
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Our Missing History
One's Belief in Reason Suffers
Retirement-planning strategies encourage investors to diversify beyond safe vehicles such as bonds and CDs. Our respondents who had planned were less conservative, in general, than those who hadn't. Before the meltdown, that approach benefited them, according to our 2007 survey. But it proved punishing during the unusually severe market downturn of recent months. So pre-retirees who had done more planning reported worse losses, on average, than those who hadn't planned.
Those Bureaucratic Rules Snag TARP Oversight
(I'm assuming the reference is to the requirement that OMB approve all requests for data from 10 or more members of the public--that's the "OMB number" in the upper right corner of most forms the public will see. Usually takes a while for OMB to approve an agency's proposed request, because people like the good Senator Grassley attack bureaucrats who want needlessly to bother good hard working citizens with silly requests for information.)
Friday, January 30, 2009
New Trees for Old?
I've put the quotes in because there seems to be controversy among the scientists over whether the reforested land is of much ecological or environmental value. The article is also unclear, as here: "In Panama by the 1990s, the last decade for which data is available, the rain forest is being destroyed at a rate of 1.3 percent each year. The area of secondary forest is increasing by more than 4 percent yearly, Dr. Wright estimates." No way to know whether the percentages are off the same base--the way the sentence is worded one would assume not, but then the point of it is lost.
The earlier part of the same paragraph:
"About 38 million acres of original rain forest are being cut down every year, but in 2005, according to the most recent “State of the World’s Forests Report” by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, there were an estimated 2.1 billion acres of potential replacement forest growing in the tropics — an area almost as large as the United States. The new forest included secondary forest on former farmland and so-called degraded forest, land that has been partly logged or destroyed by natural disasters like fires and then left to nature."The point is, the world is more complex than the protagonists on any side usually admit. As a bonus, here's chapter 2 of a book which tries to display visually how U.S. agriculture has changed, with the prime farming areas moving West. (The upstate NY area from Albany to Buffalo has dramatically changed in this regard.) The focus of the chapter is more on prime farmland shifting to urban uses, but what was prime in 1820 is now forest.
Blogging Secretaries
Maybe Secretary Vilsack and the new head of FSA, whoever she is, will do their own blogs?
One Obama Promise Broken
I think it's a lesson for good government types--it's easy to promise but harder to perform.
What was the promise: to give the public 5 days of access to legislation before Obama signs it. Sounds good. But when you are a politician eager to show progress and claim credit, it goes against the grain. So as soon as the House and Senate passed the legislation reversing the Supreme Court's decision in the Ledbetter case (the time frame for filing a discrimination complaint over unequal pay starts with the first paycheck) Obama did his signing ceremony.
The problem is the bureaucrats, of course. There are bureaucrats in the House and Senate, and the White House. They have their routines to move bills from one step to the next. And they don't necessarily listen to campaign promises. So the bill got moved along, showed up on Obama's secretary's desk as ready to sign. Ideally Rahm Emanuel would have remembered the promise and had a series of meetings with the bureaucrats to iron out the details of moving an electronic version of the bill to a website for comment and holding for 5 days. But he didn't, so smart-xxs types now are pointing fingers at the administration for breaking promises.
(IMO, it was a stupid promise--he would have done better to promise a thorough overhaul of the law making promise.)
Thursday, January 29, 2009
John Berge as White House Liaison for USDA
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Standards
And do I need to mention this piece of "how-to" advice--disgusting it should be on the web. :-)
For everyone who mourns the loss of standards, I recommend Gran Torino, which my wife and I saw yesterday. (Of course, Eastwood is the star of my favorite movie, Kelly's Heroes, which no one has ever heard of but it captures the nihilism of the late 60's perfectly.) Eastwood's character's granddaughter has multiple piercings, need I say more?
It seems the old Catch-22 is at work. In a poor economy, restaurants have to lower standards to compete. In a boom economy, consumers have to try the worst things to try to stand out. What's an old timer to do?
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
One E-Mail System for USDA
It [updating USDA systems] will not be easy. It's not easy because the way in which technology has been developed in the Department over time has been that each subcabinet area, each agency of the 29 agencies that make up the USDA, all of them have made, to a certain extent, independent decisions about the technology. And so one of the keys is to try to make sure that we work to develop a consistent system so that, for example, the Secretary of Agriculture can send one e-mail to employees on any issue as opposed to what happens today where multiple e-mails have to be sent because different agencies use different computer systems.Not sure he really wants to send an email with 100,000 addressees.
The Human Cost of the Presidency
Monday, January 26, 2009
The Rice Crisis, Revisited
In a nutshell, this is the economics of farming field crops. Farmers are "price takers", with no ability to adjust production to meet demand (unless organized into a cartel, like OPEC or the tree crop growers). Good prices one year brings expanded production the next, leading to boom and bust cycles, which are very hard on the individual farmer, particularly the small, young, and/or struggling one.It is a great thing that local growers are finally expanding production, he said, but their investments are incredibly fragile.
“We don’t have any control of the market,” he said. “There is huge volatility, and that makes it very difficult to protect their investments.”
If farmers lose a lot of money this year, they are unlikely to risk planting again, Mr. Ly said, which could prove catastrophic.
In a report released in November, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned that low prices this season could create an even worse replay of last year’s crisis by discouraging planters from producing.
“If prices were to remain depressed in 2008-9 and plantings for next year are affected,” the report said, “a similar, if not more pronounced, price surge may be witnessed in 2009-10, unleashing even more severe food crises than those experienced in the current season.”
Problems With Wikipedia
the latest price for Rice is for April, 2008.
the "2008 global rice shortage"
the 2007-2008 world food crisis.
None of these reflect such data as this from USDA:
Global 2008/09 rice production, consumption, and ending stocks are raised slightly from a month ago, while trade is little changed. The increase in global rice production is due primarily to a larger 2008/09 rice crop in China, which is up 4.2 million tons to 135.1 million, and the largest crop since 1999/00. The increase in China’s crop is due to an increase in both area harvested and yield and is based in part on national and provincial government information. Global ending stocks are projected at 82.7 million tons, up 1.8 million from last month, up 4.0 million from 2007/08, and the largest stocks since 2002/03.Or this from FAO:
Prices for most agricultural commodities have dropped significantly and swiftly in recent months. World grain prices have fallen by over 50 percent from their record highs earlier this year. International prices for other important foodstuffs, such as vegetable oils, oilseeds or dairy products have also drifted downwards, even if they still remain above their longer term trend levels. Rice is still expensive but prices may follow the path for other foodstuffs as the new crop comes on stream, export restrictions are relaxed and demand shifts further to cheaper alternatives.or this:
CEREALS
Cereal supplies rise, international prices fall
FAO’s forecast for world cereal production in 2008 now stands at 242 million tonnes (including rice in milled terms), 5.3 percent more than in 2007 and a new record. Among the major cereals, the most significant production expansion is forecast for wheat, up 11 percent from last year, but production of coarse grains is also forecast to surpass last year’s record by at least 3 percent, while rice production is anticipated to exceed the already excellent results achieved in 2007 by more than 2 percent. A combination of exceptionally high prices, which encouraged plantings, and generally favourable weather conditions contributed to the boost in world cereal production this year.
Vilsack Wants Comments?
BTW, note the URL has been compressed by tinyurl. (One of my correspondents has mentioned the long length of the USDA's URLs. I haven't regularly used tinyurl.com, but it's useful.)
France and US on Religion
Put in republican terms; Obama's inauguration speech was filled with religious leitmotifs. Unthinakble in France; Our conception of the republic is resolutely secular. The Republic is a bulwark against religion and the ravages of religion. In the States the Republic protects the Church from the ravages of the state. In the morning, French kids don't salute the flag or sing the national anthem. The French are not a patriotic lot. certainly chauvinistic but not as patriotic as the Americans - and all that shapes internal politics. An American will run the flag up at home, and tell you with a big smile and hand on heart that he or she believes in God. In France, you can be interned for such behaviour. The psycholgy shapes people and shapes politics.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Stimulus and Government
- government spending on infrastructure is highly visible. We can see how FSA spends its millions, and thus judge whether or not it spends them wisely or not, or even spends them timely. We can't similarly see the ways in which tax cuts are used.
- there's the assumption that government will be more stupid in its spending than the private sector. Again, because of the difference in visibility, the assumption can't be proved. Suppose a tax cut goes mostly to personal consumption spending, meals out, bigger cars, bigger houses, more vacations, more luxuries. My Calvinistic forebears shout from their graves that's wasteful, not productive.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
FSA, IT, and Stimulus
Many years ago (i.e., 1989) we were working on the cost-benefit justification for the replacement of the System/36's with the idea there would be a big bang, big buy. Like Sisyphus, we kept rolling the rock up the hill, and having it come back and squash us. Best I can tell, in the 20 years since there was a piecemeal replacement of System/36's with AS/400's, a gradual migration of some common functions and certain programs to the Internet, and a bit of integration between NRCS and FSA. (I'm probably biased in my assessment.)Patrick Hanley, project manager for the program to modernize the farm benefits system, said the agency is working closely with the Office of Management and Budget to make sure the new systems would comply with the federal enterprise architecture, to ensure FSA's systems can share information with other federal agencies. Hanley said the $245 million in the House stimulus bill would allow FSA to stabilize the current infrastructure and initiate modernization efforts. The money would satisfy estimates for the first two years of implementation, Taitano said.
Agency officials also are looking into commercial off-the-shelf software solutions that could help with payment processing, according to Hanley. But the initial focus will be on infrastructure and making sure the back-end servers and network are capable of handling the volume of transactions at FSA, he said.
To the extent USDA needs to buy more servers and network hardware, that should be doable within this FY. That is, it may be "shovel ready". I don't know about software development--GAO has questioned USDA's management of the MIDAS project. See my posts here and here
FSA has moved its payment function out of the county offices to centralized processing in Kansas City. That's been operational for a month or so, and hasn't blown up, yet. So I'm not clear on what COTS (commercial off-the-shelf software) could help.
Geithner and Turbo Tax--the Loss of Expertise
It's the same sort of thing I saw back when I worked for ASCS:
A district director took me around his district in North Carolina. He told me he tried to have his office managers (i.e., CED's) assign their best clerk to handling "reconstitutions" (i.e., the changing of farm records), because it was complex and important. Some 15-20 years later I found myself responsible for the people who were automating the process, trying (and perhaps failing) to make it simple and easy for any program assistant to handle.
Along the same lines, I remember an employee discussing the new word processor (one of the first with a CRT screen where you could actually insert and cut and paste and see the results of your action). She said it was nice, but she used to be proud of her ability to type fast with no mistakes. And now she was losing it, because the machine took away the premium on not making errors.
Just as, baling hay rendered obsolete the skill of making a good load of hay on the haywagon (i.e., defined as one where you got the maximum of hay on the wagon, placing your fork-fulls so that the hay bound together (i.e., being attentive to the direction the stalks of hay were lying on the wagon). And I suppose now the skill of stacking rectangular hay bales on the wagon or truck is obsolete, as you just use the forklift on the tractor to move the big round bales.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Cheering Thought for Farmers
There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.So, farmers are the root of all evil.
Early Up, Pigford
We See Ourselves? in Him and His Speech
Twill be interesting to see how it looks 10 years from now.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Newsflash: President Has a Bit of Power
Reminder to Foodies: Advise and Consent
Lesson to the Alice Waters of the world: you don't have the power. To get it, you need an "Emily's List" and get your hands dirty, not cleaning vegetables but in the day to day politicking that elects Reps and Senators.Meanwhile, a House Agriculture Committee member and a key Senate aide said they believe Chuck Hassebrook, executive director for the Center for Rural Affairs, is a top candidate for deputy secretary.
Other Capitol Hill sources said a Hassebrook nomination would be highly controversial and might not make it out of the Senate Agriculture Committee because he has been such a strong critic of farm programs. Hassebrook is an advocate of strict farm program payment limits and favors more spending on nonagricultural rural development.
Finally the Truth: Elections Are About Cats
Political scientists tend to think elections are “about” issues. I think elections are about cats. Specifically: would I let this [candidate] watch my cat for a week? Would I give him the key to my house? Would I trust her to feed ol’ Tabby, and change his litterbox? Issues are secondary. People vote for the person that they think they can trust.And a compliment for a blogger I follow:
Drezner, on the other hand, has the perfect mindset. He is just serious enough, and has a heterodox moderate-right-libertarian political viewpoint that makes almost EVERYONE angry, and certainly makes everyone think. To my mind, Drezner is the best poli sci blogger, and always will be. A good poli sci blog has to focus on world affairs and trade, not just the U.S.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
FOIA and Sec 1619
I think 5 USC Sec.552, the FOIA, has the answer in
(b) This section does not apply to matters that are-- ... (3) specifically exempted from disclosure by statute (other than section 552b of this title), provided that such statute (A) requires that the matters be withheld from the public in such a manner as to leave no discretion on the issue, or (B) establishes particular criteria for withholding or refers to particular types of matters to be withheld;I think Sec. 1619 exempts the data from disclosure.
A Poem I Like and a Teacher I Can Take
Obama Missed a Chance
Radiation Alert: FSA Computers Use Cobalt
(House AG Chair Peterson says he's urged USDA to keep the computer consultants who recommended the money and to do away with the use of "cobalt" (now corrected to "COBOL" in the post). Sounds good, except:
- I just got through watching Obama talk about new conflict of interest rules. Seems to me hiring computer consultants to implement what they just recommended is exactly the sort of thing our new President does not want.
- It's very easy to talk about getting rid of COBOL. Unfortunately the FSA systems are so interrelated it's hard. First you have to have a platform to migrate too (which appears now to be a centralized database with internet access). Second you have to maintain the old system, build the new system, and be sure you've handled the interfaces between new and old. (At least that's the way I thought when I worked there. Now I wonder whether we wouldn't have been better off just having the county offices maintain two systems for a couple years. We'll never know now.) And, third you have to respond to the demands from the Hill timely to implement new programs while keeping the old ones going.
To Keep Things in Perspective
Akamai also maintains an index showing the number of Internet users clicking into online news sites, and today's figures showed a significant spike of 5.4 million users per minute at 11:45 a.m. ET. However, that peak ranks just No. 5 on Akamai's all-time list, just below the first day of the NCAA's "March Madness" basketball tournament in 2006.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Curley : JFKennedy :: Adam Clayton Powell : Obama?
I think the lesson is that a politician who runs as a representative of a group can often get away with corruption. And it may take a couple generations for the "group" to melt enough in the American pot.
No Pay Raises for Judges
Monday, January 19, 2009
Inaugural Words
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Post Racial and Post Religious?
Joe Biden becomes the first Catholic elected to be Vice President, a mere 48 years after JFK was elected.
That fact, and the fact his religion was not an issue and was not much mentioned during the campaign, says something about the U.S.