The "Makers" and the "Takers": White House Bees

There's no better evidence for the truth of Gov. Romney's position than this report from Obamafoodorama. 

It seems those "takers" in the White House have been exploiting the industrious little "makers" who inhabit the beehives on the grounds, exploiting with this predictable result:

"The beehive this year produced 175 pounds of honey, down from the very large 2011 harvest of 225 pounds. In 2009, the hive produced 143 pounds, and in 2010 it produced 184 pounds."

 In other words, the "makers" have lost their incentives so their production is dwindling away.

"Free the White House Bees"

Sardonic Enjoyment on the Farm Bill

Because my life is not impacted by the progress or nonprogress of the farm bill, I can be amused by the gyrations in the House, as reported by Politico and Farm Policy.  Because I'm a Democrat, my amusement is increased because the Republicans appear to be having a tad more difficulty with its politics.

One thing you can always rely on Congress for, as previously observed by Mark Twain, Mr. Dooley, and Will Rogers: amusement.

Sustainable Ag on Sequestration

I've a lot of respect for the work Sustainable Ag does in tracking Congress and the administration.  Here they discuss the impact of sequestration on farm programs.  The headline is that crop insurance is defined as a prior legal obligation and therefore not subject to sequestration. 

Robot-Ready Cows? Humane Dairying

Having just posted on dairy, I might as well go whole cow.

Here's an interesting piece on the extensive adoption of robots in dairying (I owe a hat tip, but not sure to whom).  Some excerpts:

Many dairy kids [like me] leave the farm because they see their parents slave away in milking parlors twice a day, seven days a week, with never a vacation or even a break for the children's baseball games. With robots, a mechanical arm handles the milking and each cow chooses its own routine, leaving farmers with more time for family and flexibility for other chores.  

Groetsch says the gamble was worth it. The family's small squadron of farm droids, which includes a mechanical cow-back scratcher and an automatic feed pusher, has turned their barn into a 24-hour operation, with less hired help.

The 3,000-pound, red robo-milkers work around the clock, except for twice-daily cleaning sessions. They also eliminate the chore of corralling cows for milking: After being trained to accept the robot, cows get milked whenever they please. The robot measures their production and knows if a cow needs to be milked more or less often

Immigration has a role here; the Dutch are pioneers in dairy technology, Hispanics have more and more come to find their place as hired help on dairy farms.

Feminist Vegans and Dairy

From a letter to the editor of Book World (which I initially couldn't find through navigating the Times website, so retyped, and then found the link by a Google search.

Andrew Delbanco [in a review of The Victims' Revolution] classifies as "cant" the statement that "dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother."  I wonder which of these facts about dairy production he disputes: (1) mammals produce milk only after giving birth (2) female cows produce milk only if they have recently calved (3) people cannot take the milk if the calf drinks it; (4) dairy farmers therefore remove calves from their mothers within days of birth; (5) both mother and child resist and protest this separation; (6) mothers often bellow and moan for days thereafter; (7) mothers sometimes go to extreme lengths to locate and reunite with their calves; (8) dairy farmers utilize restraints to prevent them from doing so.

Dairy is the product of the exploitation for profit of the reproductive capacities of female bodies.  To consider this a feminist issue is a defensible political position.  Cows share with us the basic brain architecture responsible for emotion.  The idea that mother cows do not grieve when their children are removed from them, and are not grieving still as machines suck the milk from their bodies -- that is cant. 

signed: Patrice Jones
Springfield, VT

The writer is a co-founder of VINE, a feminist animal sanctuary that shelters, among others, survivors of the dairy industry.

The context of the quote referred to is: "A couple of years ago, Bawer [the author of The Victims' Revolution] made a trip home to see what’s happened to the academic world he left behind. He attended a few conferences for women’s studies, black studies, queer studies and Chicano studies, where he heard plenty of cant, as when a participant at a “Fat Studies” conference explained her veganism by declaring: “Dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother.”"

Based on my childhood on a small dairy, I would dispute the following:

(2) Cows produce milk for roughly 300 days after calving, not just "recently calved".
(3) Cows produce more milk than any calf could drink. 80 pounds daily in the first month after calving if memory serves, and that figure is probably twice as high now.  We fed our calves about 14 pounds of milk a day, gradually weaning them to hay and grain.  The calf was probably 3 months old, or so. Now if left together, would the calf have continued to suckle? Perhaps, though cows get tired of suckling and are willing and able to use their hooves on their offspring, so I wouldn't expect a prolonged babyhood.
(6) I'd say some cows bellow (never heard a moan) for a couple days, but the majority don't.
(7) We never had any cows go to "extreme lengths" to reunite that I remember.
(8) So we never used any restraints on "grieving cows" which weren't a part of the normal routine--i.e., stanchions to hold them from milking.

The Volt and Farming

The Post runs a Reuters piece on the GM Volt today, in which I think they distorted the picture.  (The gist of the article seems to be here, though it's not quite what appeared in the print edition.) The headline was that GM is losing $50,000 on each Volt they sell. The reality seems to be that GM and farmers share something.

In the article, there's this sentence: "Each Volt then costs around $20,000 to $32,000 to build, including materials, labor and factory operations"  And the Volt is supposed to sell for $39,145.

What that says to me is while GM is taking a loss on each Volt because of the accounting for the development costs and the overhead of the company, they've actually got positive cash flow on each one (assuming they don't discount the price much).  That's like a farmer.  As long as she can sell her crop for more than the out-of-pocket cost of growing and harvesting it, she can keep going, hoping next year the prices will be better and the yield will be higher.  That's rational, at least assuming the farmer is emotionally invested in farming.  So too is it rational for GM to continue to produce and sell Volts, assuming next year the prices will be better, the yield higher, and the company and its customers will be higher on the learning curve.

Farming Apprenticeships

Farmdocdaily has a post discussing the problems of establishing farming apprenticeships.  Sounds a lot more difficult than I would have supposed.  I guess one problem is minimum wage requirements.  Seems as if you could have a contractual relationship farmer A pays B $x an hour for work; apprentice B pays A $x for lessons.  Probably too simple.

Polling

Last night for the second day in a row I took a phone call from a polling service, using an automated system.  They asked roughly similar questions, though last night's was a bit more detailed, particularly on the demographics (i.e., religion). 

If I recall, and my memory is fading, this is the first time I've been polled solely on politics, excluding the calls where the Dems reassure themselves I'm still a rock-bound Democratic voter who will vote/has voted.

FSA and CCC: the Magic Numbers

Are 8.2 and 7.6.

What does that mean? Based on a very fast skim of the OMB report on sequestration, FSA would take an 8.2 percent hit to its administrative funds, and CCC would take a 7.6 percent hit to part of its funds. I don't understand the CCC calculation but the cut amounts to $469 million, with a good portion of the $19,175 billion either exempt or offset.

[Update: Appendix B has a breakdown of sequestrable versus exempt.  Unfortunately I can't copy the text, but something called the "Discrimination Claim Settlement" is sequestrable.  Is that Pigford, or the women and Hispanic?]

In Which I Trash the Sammies

The "Sammies" are awards ( 2012 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals ) to federal employees for service to America.  This year's awardees are described in this Post piece. 

Of course they all appear to be big shots, which sort of makes sense because bureaucratically speaking, the higher you rise in an organization the greater your impact and thus potentially the greater the contribution you can make to the U.S. 

Somehow today this logic falls flat to me.  If I've got a rich uncle who dies and leaves me money, lots of money, I might just set up a series of awards for employees at the lower end of the pay scale, people who went far beyond the bounds of their job description. Seems to me performance by lower-paid employees could be much more extraordinary, all things considered, than the jobs done by GS-14's.   Maybe set the cutoff at GS-7, or at GS-12, but no higher.

Beyond the challenge of identifying a rich uncle, the next step is figuring out an impartial way to make the awards.