Organic, Inc.

Organic, Inc., Organic Foods and How They Grow, is written by Samuel Fromartz. It's an easy read, which looks at both the small organic producers and the big ones, with products from soy milk to packaged salad greens. He explores the tensions between "organic" as a business and "organic" as a movement. He seems to me to have an open mind, accepting that organic products have their advantages, particularly in their freedom from pesticide residue, while being attracted to the romance of the movement.

In a related item, ERS has a report (summary pdf here) on the challenges facing the organic people. One item I found interesting in the context of the above book, was this sentence: "According to an ERS survey of organic handlers, 24 percent of organic sales in 2004 were made locally (within an
hour’s drive of the handlers’ facilities) and another 30 percent were made regionally." That means 46 percent of organic sales were transported long distances.

Pushback on WH Garden

Slate provides a forum for conventional ag to comment on the White House garden: the spokesmen make the usual points. Organic is a niche, conventional costs less and can be less hard on the environment, locavore doesn't satisfy tastes all year round, etc. Bottom line--the big boys aren't worried yet.

Meanwhile Obamafoodorama highlights a video of Ryan Howard (Phillies) touring the garden with Sam Kass. There's a brief picture of the garden. Nice lettuce, but I heard somewhere a claim they've harvested 80 pounds from it so far; based on the video I think not. Lettuce is bulky but light. I note the whitehouse.gov site doesn't have much on the garden--just the Howard visit since April was all I saw.

Workload for NRCS?

That's what I get from this item from the letter sent to Speaker Pelosi by a set of farm organizations about the carbon cap and trade proposals:

Eligibility and offset compensation should be based upon whether a project, technique or practice sequesters carbon or otherwise reduces GHG emissions. USDA should establish an activity baseline for each offset project type in effect on January 1, 2001 with standardized methodology. We support the establishment of a static baseline of activity to measure against when determining additionality. The fixed baseline should establish which practices were in effect on a specific piece of land on a specific date; any activity that results in GHG reductions measured against that baseline should be deemed eligible/additional.

I'm not sure why they used Jan 1, 2001 as the magic date. Nor do I know if they consulted with anyone from NRCS (or FSA) as to the feasibility of doing this. I know the acreage reports submitted to FSA provide some information on the activity on the land, but I don't know whether it's sufficient to be used for this purpose.

If and when it comes to writing legislation, there are lots of issues to be addressed. For example, there's a maintenance question--if farmer Jones was doing no-till on her acreage in 2000, does she have to have continued no-till in the years since? How about shifts in practices among the fields on the farm? And how do the bureaucrats encapsulate the requirement? (See my earlier mention of "conserving base".) Might it be another layer(s) added to the GIS?

But I'm sure this proposal is causing some bureaucratic hearts in NRCS to beat much faster.

I Passed the (Not Harvard) Typing Test

John Phipps linked to a site that offers a typing test. I won't embarrass John by repeating his score but I scored 39 words per minute. Not bad, though I used to be faster. My elder sister told me I needed to take the typing course in high school, because college papers had to be typed and she earned some money by typing them for male students. So I did, being one of the few male students in the class. It was difficult for a few weeks, but then suddenly the neural network got rewired and the link between recognizing the word on the page and hitting the proper keys to type the word became automatic and natural.

Although taking the course meant lowered my high school grade average by enough, I think, to drop my class standing, typing and typing reasonably fast has always helped, so I should thank my sister for her advice.

I Failed the Harvard Face Recognition Test

Freakonomics linked to a series of puzzlers from a Harvard research project. Being an impatient sort, I opted for the shortest-- a face recognition test. Simply put, they display a face (face only and a bit "off" from a normal portrait of the subject), you type the name (or say you don't know), they display the correct answer and you say whether you're familiar with the person.

Anyway, I did very poorly, only recognizing 25 percent of the people with whom I was familiar (I got Obama and George Clooney and Scarlett Johannsen :-). I've always been poor at facial recognition (and sometimes, more now, at remembering the name which goes with the face I recognize) which has often made me awkward in social events. Or, possibly it's because I've had below average exposure to social events that I never developed the neurons needed to recognizing and distinguishing faces. That's what some of the latest brain research might indicate, if you believe Malcolm Gladwell.

Great News from Harvard

Via Greg Mankiw the senior class at Harvard is going much less into finance and much more into teaching and health care than they were 2 years ago.

Supreme Court Speculation

I find it fun to speculate how Ms. Sotomayor's confirmation to the Court might work out. We know Ginsburg and Scalia are the best of friends, which is totally surprising and counter-intuitive, so let me guess:

• Sotomayor and Thomas might well get on. He seems shy, she seems not, they share a background in that their opponents diss their appointments and careers as affirmative action babies.
• Roberts, Alito, and Sotomayor are of an age, so there might be a generational divide. It might be hard for Sotomayor to show Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer the deference which they might expect from their seniority. Sotomayor, Roberts, and Alito might form a "new boys [sic]" club.
  
• Obviously Ginsburg and Sotomayor would share the gender experience.
• Alito graduated from Princeton before she did, and didn't like the idea of women undergrads, but old alums might share a bond.
• There seems to be little common ground between Sotomayor and Stevens or Kennedy, which might be bad news for us liberals.

Of course, the other lesson from the Ginsburg/Scalia bond is that justices can perfectly well separate their opinions and their personal feelings.

Should the World End in 400 Years?

Or rather, what proportion of your income would you spend to help ensure the world wouldn't end in 400 years? That's the nugget buried in the economics discussed at this blog.

Somehow it seems very important to me, even though the economists tend to say I shouldn't worry my head.

Wingnuts and Open Gov

Federal Computer Week has a piece on the open.gov episode. The optimistic ending: do more open gov and the "birthers" will lose their zeal. In other words, you gotta outlast them.

Pork = Fat = Lard = Good

I'd guess, because I'm too lazy to click the mouse, that using the term "pork" in connection with government programs had some relation to the idea there's lots of "fat" to cut out, and we all know fat is bad, except for Slate, which has this article praising lard. And I remember mom cooking with lard.