Attention NASCOE: Congress and Show Me the Money

The Post's Wonkblog has a piece reporting on research on Congress.  Seems that if one approaches a Congressional office with a request for a meeting, when the participants are "constituents", you are much less likely to have the request granted than if the participants are "campaign donors".  This is, of course, a totally surprising result; news which will be buried by the media.

[Update:  A modification--the key point is not that the participants donated to the member of Congress, but that they had donated to some campaign.  So they could be seen as more active and committed participants in the legislative process.  See this interview with the researchers.]

NASCOE has changed its representative on the Hill recently, as they struggle to present their point of view in the budget and legislative battles.  Perhaps it's time for them to set up a PAC to make contributions, as money seems to talk much louder than the soft voice of logic.

Fraud in FSA 578's

I don't recall this before, but maybe that's poor memory, or poor description of what happened:

Getting Food to The People

Whatever happened to the veggie truck and the bakery truck?  An older relative of mine who used to live in the DC suburbs before the war (WWII that is) remembers being able to buy fresh vegetables from a truck and bakery goods from another truck.  I assume such service couldn't withstand the restrictions on driving during WWII and the competition from supermarkets after the war.  But maybe not.  The milkman continued to deliver in my semi-rural area even into the early '50's, and a Good Humor truck has made occasional appearances in  my Reston cul-de-sac within living memory.

I do see the food movement as trying to take us back to the 1920's, the time when farmers grew a variety of crops, there were farmers markets in cities, and nobody was obese (except William Howard Taft, Chief Justice and ex-President).  Or maybe it's a matter of the pendulum swinging: from variety to standardization and uniformity and then back again.  Certainly technology is enabling a lot of new services: car sharing, room sharing, even toilet sharing (see here).  No reason it couldn't be adapted to support delivery routes and other niche marketing devices for farm produce.

FSA's Budget

From the budget document

The 2015 Budget proposes a level of $1.45 billion. As part of the 2015 budget, FSA is developing a “Model Service Center” concept that will result in service centers that are better equipped, better staffed, and will provide improved service to customers. Part of the plan is to close or consolidate 250 offices and restructure the workforce to more effectively leverage its human capital. With reduced redundancies, streamlined business processes, and a reduced national footprint, FSA will be able to deliver programs more efficiently. In addition, FSA proposes additional staffing for farm loans in anticipation of increased loan demand. FSA is continuing to modernize its information technology (IT) systems and move away from unreliable, obsolete systems. Billions of dollars of annual farm program payments, conservation payments, and loans to producers have been dependent upon antiquated IT systems. FSA must continue to upgrade its IT infrastructure in order to provide more efficient and reliable services to producers. 

FSA’s MIDAS program is a critical part of its IT modernization efforts that supports farm program delivery with streamlined business processes and integrated applications that share information and resources efficiently. MIDAS achieved an initial operating capability release in April 2013 that modernized the storage and retrieval structure of current farm records and integrated this information with land use data, land imagery data and producer information. The system will permit FSA employees to access and better validate program eligibility data and financial services data from a single source and improve customer account management.

Rules for Living

1. Don't die
2. Don't grow old
3. Don't grow old and catch a cold.

Words of Wisdom From the Eighteenth Century

Boston 1775 is a good blog on everything around the Revolution.  Today in discussing the Salem gunpowder incident, he offers some words of wisdom:

"You don’t store gunpowder in a blacksmith’s shop."

Pseudo Science and Whole Foods

As a stockholder in Whole Foods (it's done well over the last decade or so) I welcome all positive news for the company.  So I shouldn't promote this article  (Hat tip-kottke.org) which compares the pseudo-science found in the sales pitch for some WF products to creationism and wonders why crunchies get upset about the latter but not the former.

However, I like the article.  It's always good to mock oneself.

Blast from the Past: ACP

The old Agricultural Conservation program was in operation when I joined ASCS.  I can remember a trip by a county executive director (Pitt county, NC maybe?) to a sawmill where people were making woven wood garden baskets.  This was fall, I think tobacco harvest was well over, so it was work for after harvest time.  Anyhow, the CED was signing up a couple landowners/part-time farmers to ACP practices.

ACP was a cost-sharing program, the farmer paying part of the cost of "approved conservation practices", ASCS paying the other part.  It was early in the Nixon administration, which didn't believe in the program (thinking it basically enhanced production so should be entirely paid for by the farmer).  They ended up in a battle with Congress over the program, resulting in a number of changes.  Over the years it was reformed again and finally moved to SCS (which had always fought with ASCS over it).

Why do I babble on about it?  This bit from Farm Policy:

"In other policy related news, Mark Peters reported in today’s Wall Street Journal that, “Kevin Hollinger planted radishes and oats last fall in his corn and soybean fields, but he isn’t planning to harvest them. Instead, he is letting the crops die over the winter to improve the soil and keep fertilizer and other nutrients from running into nearby waterways.
“‘I could hardly go to town without someone asking: ‘What’s that in your field?’’ said Mr. Hollinger, a fourth-generation farmer.
“Helping to foot the bill for his experiment is a pilot program set to launch fully next month. Farmers in the Ohio River basin are being paid to make changes—from what they plant to how they handle manure—in an effort to minimize runoff that can cause hypoxia, or low oxygen levels, in waterways.”

 Winter cover  were one set of the conservation practices covered by ACP.  I find my memory is foggy here.  I don't know whether they were dropped, like lime was, and later reinstated into EQIP and CSP or whether they have always survived.

Words of Wisdom From a Teenager

“You can create your own miracle,” Shiffrin said when the gold medal was on a sash draped around her neck. “But you do it by never looking past all the little steps along the way.”

From NYTimes

Understatement of 2008

"The failure of a major investment bank, the forced merger of another, the largest thrift and insurer teetering, and the failure of Freddie and Fannie are likely to have a significant impact on the real economy,"

From 2008 transcript of FED meeting.

The Persistence of Error

Mark Twain had lots of things to say about lies, including a line about a lie getting being half-way round the world while truth was still getting its boots on.

A corollary to that is that error lasts and lasts, while corrections don't.  Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum note an instance:  Netflix House of Cards believes the retirement age for social security is 65.

Bad Mistake: Gates and SOFAs

Reading Mr. Gates' memoir, Duty.  He talks about negotiating a status of forces agreement with Iraq and making a very bad mistake:  tell the Iraqis to go talk to the other nations with which the US has status of force agreements. 

What could go wrong with that?  Surely everyone is happy to have US soldiers on their land, aren't they?

No--everyone the Iraqis talked with complained about the behavior of US troops and the aggravations of their sofas  SOFAs.

Just a reminder of how a smart man, surrounded by smart people, who spent his career trying to understand other nations, could lapse into self-satisfied smugness about American virtue.

Pigford Is Over?

That's the message, without the question mark, of this FSA notice.  

I await a scholarly study of the episode.

Paperless Government

The Post has an article describing the efforts of the paper industry to lobby against "paperless government", like the requirement that every recipient of government money go to direct deposit.  Apparently paper companies are feeling the impact of IT on their bottom line and so argue that every citizen should have the right to get paper instead of electrons.

I've written before I think that part of the sales pitch for the IBM System/36 was the "paperless office".  That didn't happen.  But a lesson for us:  change can come slower than its enthusiasts promise, but it can come. 

LBJ and Vietnam

The NYTimes had an article on LBJ's legacy.  The premise of the article is the legacy has been overwhelmed by Vietnam and his other achievements diminished.  No doubt that is true.  At the risk of being a contrarian, I'd like to argue that his legacy is secure, at least in the long term after I'm dead.

Why?  Because I think Vietnam, while destructive of millions of lives and causing much agony, will ultimately appear to be a dead end, while civil rights will never appear so.  Already I think I see a general downgrading of the Cold War.   I think it's true that most of the US population wasn't born when the Cold War ended, and the number of people for whom it was a live issue (say those born before 1970) is diminishing. 

So if the Cold War is fading, so too must Vietnam, which was seen as a battle in the Cold War.  As it turned out, I think the current conventional wisdom is there was no convincing rationale for LBJ to expand our involvement.  So it's a mistake for LBJ, but we don't mostly remember our presidents for their mistakes, but their accomplishments. And there I think LBJ's will only grow.

Incredible Cows

From Wonkblog something I find incredible:

"There doesn't appear to be a cap yet on the projections," says Nigel Cook, a dairy expert at the University of Wisconsin's School of Veterinary Medicine. Even though cows are producing 23,000 pounds per year on average, some herds produce more than 30,000 per head -- and he's found exceptional animals that can produce between 45,000 and 50,000. If more cows can be brought up to that level, the line could keep moving upward for a good while yet. Unlike poultry, for example, the state of dairy science isn't anywhere near maturity.

 We were doing well to produce more than 10,000 lbs per year.  

Cooper Retires

I mentioned Willie Cooper, FSA state executive director for Louisiana, previously.

The USDA blog reports his retirement dinner was yesterday.  What it doesn't say is, assuming he stayed in the old Civil Service retirement system, for the last 16 or so years he's been working without increasing his retirement annuity (since an employee maxed out retirement benefits at about 40 years of service).

Downton Abbey Economics

For those who watch Downton Abbey, the Post had a piece on its economics yesterday.

It's all good, but I've a couple concerns.  Apparently the estate includes several thousand acres of land which are farmed either by tenants or by the estate.  This season a long-time tenant died and Mary and Tom were going to take over the farm, since the tenant was in arrears on his rent.  The Earl responded to the tenant's son's appeal that the son take over the farm, and loaned him money to pay the arrears.

From this episode, one assumes that when the estate farms the land, it has either sharecroppers or wage laborers doing the work.  Not sure that's right though.  I'm mentally comparing the picture with the post-bellum South, with its mixture of cash tenants, share tenants, and day laborers.  Not sure how it corresponds or if it does.  To the extent the estate wants to take over the land, it's assuming a bigger risk from weather and market factors.  Weather in England may be less extreme than in the US, and I don't know what the market for wheat is doing post-war.

Continuing on farming, back during WWI Lady Sybil learned to drive a tractor being used on one of the farms.  I'm not sure the context: whether it was the tractor of an independent farmer, one owned by a tenant, or one owned by the estate.  At any rate, expenditures for capital investment like tractors were a big hurdle for tenants, so I wonder about the financing of the tractor.  (I suspect Fellowes threw in the tractor just for dramatic purposes, without intending any economic analysis.  But then, that may be true of the whole series.)

The Olympics, Past and Present

A relative is into the Olympics, describing his family's trips to see them on his blog, although this year they're staying at home and he's watching 94 hours of Olympic coverage every day. (My relatives are gifted.) Their trips begin with the Nagano games of 1998, through Torino of 2006, Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010, and London 2012.  The earliest descriptions are in the form of a diary, in a Word doc, but which now are available through his blog. He's a good photographer, so includes nice photos.  He also collects Olympic pins, which forms a theme throughout the series.

End of an Era

This notice announces the replacement of FSA fax machines by an Internet based fax solution.

When I joined ASCS there were two methods of getting instructions to the field fast: the printed notice, which typically would take 2-3 days to get printed, put in the pouch mail for the state office, and be received by the state office.  The state office could modify the notice, print copies for the counties, and mail them out.  So we probably figured on 3-5 business days for material to hit the county office, and that was with everything working smoothly.

The other method was the "wire notice", ideally a page or two, because it would be taken to the Department's teletype office  and typed on the teletype for wiring to the state offices.  This cut the time to 2-4 hours, but the state office still had to retype the incoming copy, print, and mail to county offices. (The text was in all caps, which has left me with a confirmed prejudice against all caps in any form.)

So in the early 70's the Records and Communications Branch of the Administrative Services Division got into facsimile machines.  Rather quickly as I remember it they got the money to install fax machines in each state office and we moved the "wire notices" over to the fax machines. It took a long while for the Department's teletype center to be closed down: AMS did their market news through there, they put new releases "out on the wire" (and those were still the days when a news release could move commodity prices), and selected people with homeland security responsibilities (as we'd call them today, then they were "defense" responsibilities) got copies of State Department cables, both the FAS stuff and other traffic.

So the fax machine has had its run of about 30 years, being replaced by a software package.  RIP fax machines.

Most Rural STudents

It turns out that the state where I was born, New York, ranks 8th in the nation for number of rural students.  The link (hat tip I think the Rural Blog) is to an interactive map of the country which shows lots of data on rural education.  (Texas is first in number of rural students.)

How We Blind Ourselves: Twins Born in Different Years

Freakonomics has a post laying out the odds of twins being born in different years.  Mildly interesting, until you get to the end.  These are well-educated bright people, who would like to come up with a counter-intuitive result.  I could describe myself that way.:-(

Acreage Reporting for Organic Farming

Just a stray thought: has the acreage reporting system been changed to recognize organically grown crops and the GIS system to recognize organic ground? 

The Shocking News from DC

Senator McCain as quoted in Farm Policy commenting on the farm bill:

“This is all part of Farm Bill politics. In order to pass a Farm Bill, Congress must find a way to appease every special interest of every commodity association from asparagus farmers to wheat growers. If you cut somebody’s subsidy, you give them a grant. If you kill their grant, then you subsidize their crop insurance.”

 It's all part of Congress being able to point with pride at goodies provided and with alarm at goodies taken away.

B*S*: What Languages Have the Term

Ran across this, based on a link from John Phipps:

I've noticed an interesting thing about bullshit: There's no word for it in Japanese. Just as some Japanese words (like 適当) can't be translated without a long and complicated explanation, a proper understanding of "bullshit" typically occupies an entire dinner party in Japan. Observing this fact, I came up with my theory of what makes (or made) Western Civilization unique.

 As it happens, I know the French equivalent for s*** is "merde".  And Google Translate  says the French have two words for b*s* : conneries and foutaise.  gives a Japanese term for it.  But Translate uses the English term for a number of languages--not sure whether that's just a default or whether Armenian has, in  fact, imported b*s* as its own term. 

Payment Limitation--Paper Entities

A recent case:

The owners of a central Illinois farming business that will pay $5.3 million to settle allegations it faked partnerships to avoid limits on subsidies say they did nothing wrong.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday said Dowson Farms of Divernon agreed to the settlement. The department accused three of the owners of creating fake partnerships in the names of employees between 2002 and 2008 to bypass caps on subsidies. The three didn’t admit any wrongdoing.

Read more: http://www.sj-r.com/article/20140130/NEWS/140139902#ixzz2s5rq0FYo

Where Do Farmers Come From?

Seems to me that the conventional wisdom is that farmers inherit, that the son (almost always the son) inherits the farm and that's where farmers come from.  I say "conventional wisdom" although I really mean the presumption in history.  Once it was true, of course.  If 90-95 percent of the population is farmers, as in colonial America, then inheritance is the logical answer.

The economists had the concept of the "agricultural ladder", where a man worked his way up from day labor to sharecropper to renter to owner.  That may have worked in the 19th century, but I think maybe its prevalence is overestimated.  In the case of my family, my paternal great grandfather, my maternal grandfather, and my father all moved onto farms aided by money from other occupations or sources (preaching, carpentry, and family, respectively).  That's a small sample but it's easy for historians to overlook, because there's no statistics to prove or disprove this.

Today it seems that there's a reasonable flow of people from other occupations into agriculture, particularly the "food movement" end of agriculture: the organic farmers, the community-supported agriculture, the niche products of wine, goat cheese, semi-exotic crops.

This interview with an organic farmer in Grist is interesting, covering many aspects of modern food movement farming.  Implicitly it's directed towards people coming to farming, not inheriting farming.  There was also a recent article in the NYTimes on the graying of the organic movement, which made the point that children of some people who came to organic in the 60's and 70's had no interest in continuing on their parents path.

Blanket Receipt Requirement

Sec. 12204 of the farm bill (page 895) removes the requirement that the producer ask for a receipt, so now FSA, NRCS, and RD must issue a receipt for all requests for service..

Jon Meacham Doesn't Know History?

I might as well jump on the bandwagon along with Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall.  Meacham, who writes nicely, was apparently on Morning Joe and said something to the effect that Lincoln and FDR didn't use executive orders.  Matt and Josh raise some of the obvious points, the Emancipation Proclamation and going off gold.

I've been doing a little reading in the organizational history of USDA, and in the 30's FDR created and moved SCS and Resettlement Administration (forerunner of FmHA) around via EO's.  I don't know why, but the pattern seemed to be that Roosevelt would act, then Congress would legislate.

(I suspect Meacham phrased his point poorly--that he meant that promising to lead by issuing EO's isn't very appealing.  But FDR did promise "action" in his inaugural.)

The Crystal Clarity of Congress

I love this bit buried in the farm bill: (page 145)

"PAPERWORK REDUCTION
.—In order to conserve Federal resources and prevent unnecessary paperwork burdens, the Secretary shall ensure that any additional paperwork required as a result of the regulations promulgated pursuant to subsection (a) be limited to those persons who are subject to such regulations.

 We're talking here about payment limitation and the actively engaged determination.  Either the language is meaningless, because every potential recipient of payments is "subject to" the regulations; or it's an attempt to say you can only require people who might make over the limitation to fill out any forms.  But how do you know who they are unless you collect the information?

(Similar issue arose with payment limitation back in the mid-80's.)

"Freedom to Farm"--RIP

Some 18 years after it was enacted, it looks as if Pat Roberts' "Freedom to Farm" will shortly be dead and buried.

Good riddance, IMHO.  I think I've always been of the opinion that it (the idea of phasing out payments) wasn't going to work and particularly it wasn't going to work the way Roberts drafted the provisions.  If you're going to phase out payments, your law needs to cover the whole process, taking the payments down to zero.  (Somewhat like the tobacco termination payments did.)  Instead they just had small reductions over a period of 5 years.  It was like a 2-pack a day smoker saying that he'd quit smoking by reducing from 40 cigarettes a day down to 35, and then he'd quit.

The Farm Bill Draws Nigh

Reports are that the farm bill will hit the House floor today. But EWG has an ominous post about the possibility that some provisions will run afoul of the WTO.

How Many Square Feet for a Company

Under one.

From a Times post on Chinese internet problems:

A simple Google search reveals that the address on Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne [to which Chinese web traffic was redirected] is not a corporate headquarters, but a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn.

That address — which is home to some 2,000 companies on paper — was the subject of a lengthy 2011 Reuters investigation that found that among the entities registered to the address were a shell company controlled by a jailed former Ukraine prime minister; the owner of a company charged with helping online poker operators evade an Internet gambling ban; and one entity that was banned from government contracts after selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.

I'm probably a reactionary but sometimes I get fed up with "entities" which don't do anything for society.

Identifying Discrimination in USDA Activities

USDA has published a notice of proposed rulemaking on nondiscrimination.  There's several changes, among them expanding the basis for political beliefs and gender identity.  I won't comment on that, but I will on requiring agencies to collect race, ethnicity and gender data on their customers, albeit on a voluntary basis.

I'm not sure how that works.  John Jones comes in and applies for a farm loan. He refuses to give his REG data.  He is turned down.  He appeals on the basis of REG.  Can the agency say we didn't know you were REG, so our basis for turning you down was totally rational and legal?  Can Jones say: look at me, it's obvious that I'm REG and you approved a loan in a very similar case to Sandra Smith, who wasn't REG?  And the agency says, but Sandra didn't provide REG data, so we approved her on a totally rational and legal basis?  Can the agency say only if you provide REG data can you appeal any rejection on the basis of REG?

My bottomline: I don't see how this approach to the REG data helps in the decision making and appeals process.

Grassley and Delegation of Authority

From Chris Clayton at DTN:

"Discussing the farm bill, Grassley said the principal negotiators may take his language defining an actively engaged farmer out of the farm bill and leave it up to USDA to determine who is actively engaged. This Congress is filled with lawmakers who have criticized administrative rulemaking usurping congressional authority. Yet, farm-bill conferees now seem intent on turning over rulemaking to USDA to redefine who is actively engaged as a farmer.

"The people who want to shovel this off to the administration for rulemaking, they don't want anything," Grassley said. "They want to take it out. If they could get away with taking it out, they would just take it out ... They think they can accomplish the same thing by giving to the department and the department might not do anything very significant."

Grassley's actively engaged rule only allows one person designated as the farm manager. He noted the Government Accountability Office has cited instances of 16 people classified as "managers" for a single farm entity.

Grassley reiterated there was no need to change anything in the payment-limit provisions because they were the same in both the House and Senate bills."

 I don't trust my memory because I tried and failed to find documents supporting the following: when "actively engaged" first became law, ASCS wrote regulations implementing the provision.  But I believe that the powers that be in Congress (Jamie Whitten perhaps, as he was head of House Ag and represented MS) got ASCS to back off a bit.  Don't know whether that was a provision in another law or just pressure on the USDA hierarchy.  Anyway, I'm sure FSA is looking forward to having this responsibility once again.  I'm sure.

Founders: Their Words

I may have mentioned this Founders site before, which contains the digitized correspondence of the Founding Fathers (and the Adams family).  What's neat is you can do a rapid search for terms.  Here's a list of terms and their occurrences.  (I discovered that searching on lower case picks up upper case, but not vice versa.)   Who would have thought that "electricity" would be mentioned more often than the "slave trade"?

Citizen 11,287
King 10,968
Colonies 5,581
Continent 3,334
British  17,460

United States 25,153
United Colonies  774
Constitution  7,731

Rights  16,033
Liberties 17,463
Society  17,242
Individual 6,188
Bear arms  174

Corn  2,919
Wheat 3,167
Potatoes 515
Tomato  5
Cabbage 157
Oats 806

Apples  425
Maple sugar  79


Horse 7,517
Oxen 452
Sheep 1,033
Cattle 1,782
Cow  496
Hen  151
Chicken  69

Compost  30
Marl 19
Lime 141
Manure 342

Rum  1,025
Whiskey 400
Wine 2,394
Cider  78
Ale 85
Beer 275

Gardening 1,842
Lawyer 2,673
Doctor 3,623
Farmer 2,516
Merchant 10,604
Commerce 7,537
Industry 2,392  (mostly working hard)
Teacher 485

Slave 2,953
Slavery 804
Slave trade 177

Electricity  381

What's Happening on MIDAS: Congress Wants to Know

Getting around to the omnibus appropriations bill:  the first part of the report  dings USDA for failing to report timely on MIDAS.  Also says:

"In order to leverage existing capacity and expertise within the Department, the Secretary is directed to explore the creation of a Center of Excellence for loan servicing support functions in order to provide consolidated customer service, field office support, and centralized loan services to USDA agencies and other Federal agencies. The Secretary shall consult with employee representatives and management in the Farm Service Agency Farm Loan Information Technology, Accounting, and Finance Office loan servicing support functions; the Rural Development Deputy Chief Financial Officer and Deputy Chieflnformation Officer functions; and the Rural Housing Centralized Servicing Center."

Not sure what the quote means, except that someone, an employee, a contractor, or a congressperson has a bee in their bonnet.  "Center of Excellence"?  Sounds like bs to me.

How Committees Work: Logrolling

Via Tom Ricks the Best Defense blog, I got to this Benjamin Wittes post on the recent NSA review panel.  A sentence:

The Review Group report often has the feel of a committee of very smart people getting together and amalgamating their particular obsessions without doing the work of prioritizing them

 This is, of course, how committees work, at least committees with a certain type of task.  I'm reminded of review efforts that occurred in ASCS after a change of administration: the new people would assemble a group of employees who had supported the "outs" to review agency operations.  The group would come up with a laundry list (why is it "a laundry list" I wonder) of recommendations, some of which were reasonable IMHO, some were not, but there wasn't any cohesive overall vision to it.  Maybe given the social and bureaucratic environment there couldn't and shouldn't be a cohesive overall vision.

I assume that the process which produces such reports is simple logrolling: everyone has a pet idea or two, because the committee is deliberately diverse no one has the knowledge or motive to fight against the idea, so to keep everyone happy everyone's idea is included in the report.

The End of the Clerk

Washington Post had an article on the vanishing clerk in government offices which was good.  Down to 4 percent of employees.

Two points:

• back in the day, way back in the day, a "clerk" was a high ranking position. The early Patent Office for example had a chief and a clerk, if I remember correctly.  As government offices grew, we kept inserting positions between the top and the bottom.  
• back in my day, the clerk position could be a stepping stone to advancement, though not always.  I remember a clerk in my first office, who was a spinster from Boston who'd come to DC for WWII and never advanced above that rank.  But I remember more clerks who showed intelligence and diligence and were able to transition out of the clerk to the technician and later the analyst positions.  In the days when many smart women didn't go to college, that was a well-established pathway to advancement.  And when the Feds started emphasizing EEO, we had various programs which enabled black to make a similar transition.  One downside of our current emphasis on meritocracy and college is we make the road to the top much more difficult for those who don't check all the educational checkboxes.  Then we complain about a lack of upward mobility.

I can't resist being chauvinistic enough to mention that some women clerks/secretaries advanced by marrying someone in the office.  These days what people have a fancy name (which I forget) which means college grads marry college grads, no more male boss marrying female secretary.  That's good on equality grounds, but it also limits mobility.

The Iron Triangle and Ideology

I've been looking at the history of FmHA recently.  Post WWII it started off mostly lending to farmers, operating and ownership loans.  Over time successive legislation gradually widened the scope to include lending for housing, for community facilities, to towns <2,500 people expanding to 50,000. 

I suspect, without researching it, that most if not all of these expansions went through without too much partisan controversy or debate. I see the "iron triangle" at work: the FmHA bureaucrats, the lobbyists, and the Congressional committees working together to push the changes through and with support from rural representatives of both parties.  I don't see ideology as playing much of a role, except a generic pro-rural development stance.  Just guessing, I'd think partisan politics probably comes into play more when a new agency is being created, when it's not a matter of adding functions to an existing agency which already has a bureaucracy with ties to Congress and to interest groups but creating something mostly from scratch.

Did Vilsack Read the USDA Strategic Plan?

Apparently Robert Gates didn't read the President's plans--Tom Ricks discusses Gates' rules for Washington officials as reflected in his memoirs:

"... don't place too much faith in strategy documents produced by the bureaucracy. "I don't recall ever reading the president's National Security Strategy when preparing to become secretary of defense. Nor did I read any of the previous National Defense Strategy documents when I became secretary. I never felt disadvantaged by not having read these scriptures." (Tom: That said, I do wonder whether such documents are perhaps useful as guidance to subordinate officials? But obviously not very much if the SecDef doesn't know or care what they say.)"

US Is Not Truly Liberated

From Dirk Beauregarde's piece on the latest French news:

"However when François Hollande set up home at the presidential palace with his girlfriend, no one said anything. No one seemed to mind an unmarried head of state. No one seemed to care that the unofficial first lady had her own office, staff and security guards all paid for by the taxpayer. Can you imagine this happening in America?"

No, I can't.  We're still a bit puritan I guess.

Those Rich Farmers--Some Aren't

The least wealthy member of Congress:

"On the opposite side of the spectrum is Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., the least wealthy member of Congress. He had an average net worth of negative $12.1 million in 2012, due to loans for his family's dairy farm."

He's in partnership with his brothers.  I'm not sure how the net worth works, though.  Surely any commercial lender would ensure the partnership had assets to balance the loans--like $13 million worth of cows and barns and milking equipment and land?  So he might have a zero net worth, but not negative?  Something's going on here that's not explained.

Farm Exports Include Pregnant Cows

From James Fallows on Eastport, ME:

"The city has been lobbying hard for state and federal help in restoring the rail link that connected Eastport with the Maine Central Railroad until it was abandoned in 1978. But even without a rail connection, it has steadily increased its shipments by sea. One of its specialties is container ships full of (live) pregnant cows, bound for Turkey.
Pregnant cows? European beef and dairy herds, reduced by mad cow disease and other factors, are now being rebuilt, largely with American stock. When cows make the sea voyage while pregnant, their calves can be born on European soil and have the advantages of native-born treatment. To put it in American terms, the mother cows would not be eligible to run for president, but the calves would. A company called Sexing Technologies, based in Navasota, Texas, has devised a sperm-sorting system to ensure that nearly all those calves will be female, a plus for dairy herds. Chris Gardner convinced Sexing Technologies that Eastport would be an ideal transit point, and since 2010 some 40,000 cattle have been loaded aboard ships there."

Now if I could only stand the winters, Fallows makes it sound inviting.

Polar Vortex and the White House Garden

Today's Post had a garden column in which the writer bemoaned the fate of his fall-planted fava beans, but was glad he hadn't built a hoop house because the recent cold weather would have been too severe anyway.  Caused me to wonder how the White House garden survived the cold.  In past years Obamafoodorama has noted the hoop houses surviving snow, but the cold might have been too much.

On a personal note, my wife harvested the last fall-planted (transplanted) kohlrabi just before the single digit weather.  Still good.

The Good of Polar Vortexes

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm rather blood thirstily identifies a major major benefit of the current polar vortex.  (Joel Achenbach at the Post has the proper fogey attitude towards new-fangled concepts, like polar vortex.)

What's the benefit?  Below the break

RMA Done Good?

From a post on "best practices", one of which was an RMA initiative:

To counter fraud, waste, and abuse, the Agriculture Risk Protection Act of 2000 mandated the use of a data warehouse and data mining technologies to improve crop insurance program compliance and integrity. RMA asked the Center for Agriculture Excellence (CAE) at Tarleton State University to create a system to monitor and analyze the program, identifying fraud using satellite, weather, and remotely sensed data to analyze claims filed by farmers for anomalous behavior that could indicate fraudulent or other improper payments. CAE is at the leading edge of application of remote sensing to agricultural insurance.
The RMA program has had several significant impacts, including:

• Identification of anomalous claims, plus monitoring as a preventive measure
• Linking claims histories with weather data
• Integration of the latest MODIS and Landsat satellite data into the data mining process
• Automated claims analysis

The results: cost avoidance of over $1.5 billion (2001–2007) scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Estimated reductions from prior year indemnities represent more than a $23 return for every dollar spent by RMA on data mining since its inception.
One initiative produced a list of producers who were subjected to increased compliance oversight; from 2001 to 2011, this reduced unneeded indemnity payments by approximately $838 million.

Paperless FSA Operations

"The USDA Farm Service Agency offices are moving toward a paperless operation."

That's from a piece on producers receiving material by email.

I remember when the System/36 back in 1984 was being justified as allowing us to move to a paperless office.  Not sure that ever worked out.

Duplication and the USDA Cloud

From FCW on the USDA cloud:

In 1962 — in the early days of mainframe computing, punched cards and tape — then-Secretary Orville Lothrop Freeman wrote a memo warning that USDA was headed down a path of duplicative spending on IT programs.
The memo was unearthed earlier this year by someone in USDA’s National IT Center (NITC) around the time the group was pushing for certification for its private cloud under the government’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). In June, USDA’s cloud offering became just the sixth infrastructure as a service to receive provisional certification under those federal security standards. It joined private-sector giants such as Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, CGI Federal, Autonomic Resources and Lockheed Martin.

Not sure what significance the USDA cloud has, it certainly won't produce rain for drought-ridden areas, but I enjoyed the reference to Freeman.  Used to be ASCS had computer centers in New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Kansas City but towards the end of Freeman's tour they got transferred over to the Department.  Minneapolis was shut down, along with a satellite center in Portland, if memory serves.  Over the years the other agencies in USDA also had some reorgs, but I notice that we still have centers in St. Louis (which I think is the old FmHA center) and Kansas City.  I suspect that means that the integration of agency operations into a seamless web where historic divisions are not obvious to the user is not happening.  C'est la vie.

Good News for the New Year: Going on to College

I think I owe a hattip to Wonkblog for a link to 13 data tables from Pew Research, all of which are interesting, though most are depressing.  But the one which is good news to me is this, showing that Hispanics who graduate from high school are going on to college at a higher rate than whites, and both blacks and Hispanics have improved their rates over the past 12 years.