Simplicity and Organics

Michael Pollan's favorite organic farmer, Joel Salatin, has a new book, with an excerpt here.  Basically he's noting the misalignment between an organic operation and modern methods of marketing, particularly fast food chains and Whole Foods.  He discusses his dealings with Chipotle, where he's succeeded in selling parts of pigs (shoulders and hams) to them, but that leaves him with the problem of selling the rest of the pig.  All in all, it's a complex job of negotiation and management, a far cry from the simplicity some associate with organics.

As I've noted before, what's true for the livestock and poultry farmer like Salatin is also true for the organic field crop farmer.  To make organics work, to make the land produce as much as conventional agriculture, you need to rotate your crops.  That permits Rodale to claim their organic corn production is equal in yield to conventional, but it's also a sleight of hand because the organic corn producer has lots of alfalfa she needs to market.

As an aside, Dr. Pollan appears to be recycling his books as a good organic person should: he's got illustrated versions out now, but it's been a few years since he had a new one.

Farewell Tortilla Factory

We've been eating at Tortilla Factory in Herndon since about 1978, on a regular weekend schedule from the early 80's.  No more.  Today was our last lunch and their last day.

Everything changes and very few human organizations last and last.

It was good while it lasted.

Farmers and Computers and Public Libraries

 Both before and after I retired I've pushed the idea of farmers getting service through Internet applications.  But there are some practicalities I often miss, like the learning curve barrier.  In a different context, it shows up in the following--via Kevin Drum, from a Metafilter thread on the role of public libraries: a long comment--two excerpts:

If you can take yourself out of your first world techie social media smart-shoes for a second then imagine this: you're 53 years old, you've been in prison from 20 to 26, you didn't finish high school, and you have a grandson who you're now supporting because your daughter is in jail. You're lucky, you have a job at the local Wendy's. You have to fill out a renewal form for government assistance which has just been moved online as a cost saving measure (this isn't hypothetical, more and more municipalities are doing this now). You have a very limited idea of how to use a computer, you don't have Internet access, and your survival (and the survival of your grandson) is contingent upon this form being filled out correctly. 

....[So you go to the library to use their computers, but you don't have the experience with them and can't find the site.}

Before leaving you decide to try one last thing. You go up to the desk, and explain your situation. The tired, overworked person at the desk nods along, and says, “well, we're not supposed to do this, but...” and tells you to walk around the desk. With a few clicks on the mouse they have the site up that you spent 30 minutes trying to find. They bring up the electronic form, politely turn their head aside as you fill in your social security number, and then ask you a series of questions to satisfy the demands of the form. It comes to your email address, and you have to admit that you don't have one, so the librarian walks you through setting up a free one and gives it to you on a slip of paper. “We have free computer classes,” he says (and you're lucky, because a great deal of public libraries don't), but you look at the times and realize that between your job and taking care of your grandson you'd never be able to attend, and it'd probably be too hard anyway. You thank him, and he smiles, and you leave. Congratulations, you've staved off disaster until the next time you need to use a computer for a life-essential task.

The whole comment and thread is interesting. Unfortunately most farmers don't have access to the sort of public libraries assumed in the thread (which sounds like my local Reston library).

 

Stakeholders

Kim at Wolf Trap Opera in a blog post mentioned that "stakeholders" made her think "of someone holding a sharp stick and threatening me with it :))" "Stakeholders" were big back when we were supposedly reengineering business processes--we were supposed to identify the stakeholders and get their buy-in.  That's difficult and often didn't happen.

But how did "stake holder" evolve into its current meaning from the original meaning of a neutral party who has temporary custody of the bets/stakes of contestants?

USDA and Immigration

Usually think liberals favor easier immigration, though sometimes it's libertarians.  And usually think liberals look favorably on the food movement, which is usually anti-USDA.  But DTN reports Vilsack got favorable reaction  for his call for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.  He was keynoting the USDA ag forum, so speaking to a bunch of ag people who like easier immigration so they have someone to pick their fruits and vegetables, process their meats, and milk their cows.

Another French Revolution (for Bureaucrats)

Bureaucrats care deeply about titles, which is why this change in France is a revolution.  Where the U.S. has "Miss", "Mrs." and "Ms", the French have had only "mademoiselle" and "madame".  But no more.  As described by Dirk Beauregarde, instead of coming up with a third term as we did, French feminists have forced the bureaucracy to do away with "mademoiselle" and use only "madame".  And Sarkozy is a right winger.

What I'd Like to Know: Age Distribution of Small Farms

From Farm Policy, this quote got me wondering:

The FT article concluded by stating that, “Tom Sell, a farm industry lobbyist in Washington, says US farmers receive relatively less support than their peers in other countries. He adds that removing financial aid will hurt smaller, family farms and accelerate the move to industrialised [sic], large-scale farming.

This follows a discussion of how the biggest farms produce most of the crops.

But what I'd like to know, is how the age distribution of farmers relates to the size distribution of farms.  It's probably available in some ERS study, but I'm lazy today, having just returned from working in the garden for the first time.  Why would I like to know this?

My suspicion is there's two types of old farmers, those with children who are going to go into farming (like John Phipps) and those who aren't (like my dad).  The first category and the young farmers (not many of those) are forward-looking, wanting to expand, buying up land when they have the chance, looking at the future, etc. etc.  The second category is probably conservative, without the drive or incentive to take a lot of chances in order to expand.  My bet is there's a big difference in the size/intensity of the farming operations of the first category and the second. If my stereotypes have some truth to them, we might well be overestimating the importance of a safety net for the smaller farms. I'd also hazard the guess that the first category is more indebted than the second, so the second can coast to retirement by mortgaging or selling land.

I may well be wrong; it's always dangerous to traffic in stereotypes and examples which readily come to mind, but then life is dangerous.

Misleading With Statistics

Alex at Marginal Revolution posts a chart showing that the exhaustion of unemployment benefits tracked very closely with disability applications under Social Security.

Unfortunately, it's a tad misleading, so  commentor Rahul produced a graph less misleading because it uses the same scale and intervals for both measures..

Alex's point is still valid, but it's a damned sight less dramatic.

One of the 10 best books I ever read: "How to Lie with Statistics". which dates to the 1950's.

A 500K Mercedes?

Who knew, but this piece via University Diaries on the rich kids at GWU shows a fancy student car which retails for over $500,000.  


To the barricades.

The "Three Option" Program

From Farm Policy, Rep. Peterson predicts a 3 option program in the next farm bill:

“Rep. Peterson: Well, there will be. I think it’s going to be three options. I mean, I don’t see any other way to do this. There’s going to be the target price, kind of a cyclical component, there’s going to be some kind of shallow loss/catastrophic loss component, and there’s going to be a cotton program, the STAX program. And I don’t see any… I mean, rice and peanuts are the ones that are primarily interested in the target price. That brings them on board. And there might be some people out here that might use the target prices. The other commodity groups are more interested in the shallow loss/catastrophic loss.
“But we just don’t have the money to do a one-size-fits-all program anymore. And frankly, the crops are different. I mean, the rice market, they don’t have ethanol, so they’re struggling. They don’t have access to Japan and a lot of these big rice consuming countries. They don’t have access. Now peanuts, they’ve got their own problems. Cotton, you know, the WTO case. So to try to fix all of them and have a program that’s going to work for cotton or for corn and soybeans and wheat, I just don’t see it, so I think there will be three options.”

He also says:

 "You know, I don’t know why we couldn’t even handle disaster through crop insurance, and I’ve talked to the crop insurance people about that. It would be a fairly efficient, I think, way to do it. So I think that’s where we’re heading, barring some big collapse in prices. But if we get back to a deal where corn prices go back down again significantly, corn and soybeans, then that could change the whole picture of things, and it could happen.”

 When I joined ASCS in 1968 there were separate titles of the farm bill for wheat, for feed grains, for upland cotton, and for producer rice and farm rice.  Over the years the programs gradually became more similar to the point they could be covered in one title.  Now it looks as if the commodity differences are  rearing their heads again.  Makes for more complex administration.