USDA's People's Garden

Remember last year when Michelle Obama made a big splash with her White House garden?  Well, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack wanted his garden, or at least a "People's Garden" (he's too young to remember the 1950's China).  His loyal troops tore up some ground near the ivory tower, as Chet Adell used to call the Administration Building back in 1968, although I don't remember whether it was lawn or parking lot.  They blogged about it last year and posted better records than the White House on production.  But the blog has been quiet.  Since I tweaked the White House about getting our peas in the ground earlier than they, I wondered how the USDA garden was doing this year.

The bad news--you can't see much.  At least not much if you don't tweet. (As I don't.)  But they are using Twitter to update on progress and I gather they planted their peas last Friday.  Congratulations to them, both for beating Michelle and for getting into Web 2.0. And for their disgusting raised beds,

I Can't Resist

With no comment, from an email from my alma mater:

"Cornell Big Red had a phenomenal weekend! Men's ice hockey clinched a spot in the NCAA tournament and will play this Friday in Albany. Women's hockey lost 3-2 in the final minute of the third overtime to Minnesota-Duluth in the NCAA championship.

Saturday, two Big Red wrestlers were in the finals at the NCAA Championships, and Kyle Dake won the title! As a team, Cornell finished second behind Iowa.

Congratulations to all our athletes and coaches, plus the alumni, parents, and friends who have supported them over the years!

Cornell athletics has been all over the national media--just do a Google search and you'll see dozens upon dozens of articles! Also visit www.cornellbigred.com for details."

Post on Local Slaughterhouses

I'm late in putting this up--the Post had an article on the growth of small local slaughterhouses. It fits with my earlier post on the Creekstone beef outfit.

Rural Wages and Unemployment

A factoid buried in this Daily Yonder article, with a nice graphic showing wage levels in rural counties: some correlation between low wages and low unemployment.  For example, WV has high unemployment but the unionized (presumably) coal miners who are employed have high wages.

Natural Beef in New York City: Creekstone Farms

A long and interesting article in the Times today on Creekstone Farms, which is providing beef to a number of NYC's better restaurants.  An excerpt:

Close to a fourth of Creekstone’s meat is “natural,” meaning free from antibiotics and growth-producing hormones; cattle are given vegetarian feed and, as a quality-control measure, it is noted which ranch each came from. In 2005, after adopting stringent standards, the company won certification to provide its highest-end products to theEuropean Union, Japan and Korea.

“We want to know that the animals are raised responsibly,” said Riad Nasr, an executive chef at Minetta Tavern.

And customers do, too, because “they can’t trust the regulators,” said Malcolm M. Knapp, who heads a restaurant consulting company in Manhattan that bears his name. “These days, diners can use their phones right in the restaurant to check beef out on the Internet. And they do.”

It looks like a trend.  (Later on in the article they note the higher prices Creekstone has to charge.) There are those small livestock farmers who oppose NAIS, but there are those who are finding a niche by marketing a history along with the meat.  Maybe we'll end with a 3-tier system: the mass market meat, the quality market meat with a history, and the local market meat with a face.

Amish and Health Care Reform

The Amish have problems with insurance, as essentially the community self-insures.  Via Marginal Revolution, this article describes some of the complications they face, particularly as employers.  But the incidental information is interesting--who knew there was an Amish employer with over 150 employees?  And what does it do to Amish society to have an employer/employee relationship?

Using Technology as a Work-Around

Ajay Shah has a post on the use of cell-phones and texting to work around problems in taxi queues at the Bombay airport.

Comes the Revolution?

Say it isn't so: "“But we all thought blogging was going to transform academic life, and that didn’t really happen.”

Le Fooding and the Flymo

From Dirk Beauregarde, a long post on France and French (the language). The art of good food in France is now, if you can believe him, called "le fooding", following the pattern of creating a quasi-French word by adding "ing" to an English word.

And via Dirk, "hover mowers"   (as in hovercraft).

Now It's the Bureaucrats' Turn

Now health care reform has passed, it's the job of the bureaucrats to get to work.  My fervent hope is Obama and Sebelius are worrying about it already. (I have my doubts--politicians don't usually worry about nuts and bolts and implementation, particularly charismatic politicians, which I guess we can call Obama one again, now he's got a big victory.) If I were them I'd hire some people from MA who implemented Romneycare plus arm twist Mark McClellan into returning to government.  McClellan is the guy in the Bush administration who implemented Medicare Part D very successfully, given that the Dems were very much on the warpath as it was passed and in its early days.  But as time passed the criticism vanished, which is a good indication that McClellan is an effective bureaucrat.  There's nothing like having a bit of experience before starting a big job.