Lack of Compatibility

From NASCOE's June update.:

"We recently learned that OMB /DAFP made a visit a Pennsylvania county office a few weeks ago. The visit focused on the progress of MIDAS. The group was curious why MIDAS is not being used as the platform for the new farm bill programs, and asked why we continue to utilize 2 systems (Web Farm & MIDAS). We understand that the group seemed to be surprised at the lack of compatibility and interaction of our software programs. Reports were that the visit was beneficial, yet eye opening for the OMB/DAFO group." 

 One thing the IT types who were involved in Infoshare never understood, and I failed to make them understand, was the problem of transitioning from legacy systems to new systems.  We went through hell in 1985-7 when we transitioned to the System/36 and everyone was happy to forget the pains.  As Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The Ridiculous II

This article at Modern Farmer shows the extent to which our wealthy society can extend the ridiculous.

I can understand the logic of this dairy farm: maximizing the welfare of dairy cows.  Late breeding, no slaughter--cows dying when they "naturally" would.  It's not 100 percent clear, but apparently they don't send their bull calves to slaughter either.  It all fits the touchy-feely ethos of the food movement, but more so.

I can accept that 100 years from now wealthy nations will get most of their milk and meat from truly industrial process (i.e., bypassing animals altogether).  The remainder of the supply might be subdivided with various approaches, some organic, some slaughter free, etc.

But I won't be around to see it and I'm too much a man of my time and place to find it other than ridiculous.   A quote:

"At $10 per gallon, the price of slaughter-free milk is almost triple the cost of whole milk, which retails for an average of $3.69 per gallon. The price reflects the cost of producing the milk as well as calf care and “retirement” costs for the herd. (The cost of labor isn’t factored into the price because the farmhands are volunteers).

 So the true price is probably closer to $20 per gallon, because the labor is being paid/supported by trust funds, etc.  Might one be able to find suckers customers willing to pay more than three times the price of conventional milk?  Might one be able to find suckers people willing to get up at 4 am to milk the cows for no pay?  Yes, I suppose one might.  I still say ridiculous.

The Persistence of Myths and Cartoons

I suspect anyone who works in a given field long enough will find numerous errors and myths in the mass media depiction of the field.  This has not, I think, changed with the Internet. Whenever I go to wikipedia on some agriculture related stuff, I find errors.  If I had energy I might correct them but I don't, mostly. (For example, US agriculture says agricultural activity occurs in "most states".) Or many general statements about agricultural subsidies are wrong or misleading.

The Post's Glenn Kessler recently identified an error in the pages of the NYTimes, in columnist Tom Friedman's column.  (It took as fact Dean Rusk's comment in the Cuban missile crisis, that we were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy just blinked--not true.) 

I'm reminded of a famous cartoon, I think it was, showing a guy working late and telling his wife: 'there's something wrong on the Internet".   But the Internet is great--I just googled to find that cartoon so the link was added after I wrote.

Speaking of cartoons, I strongly recommend this book--very funny

Alas, Poor USDA, I Knew You When

From Farm Policy

Chairman Lucas explained that, “It turns out that the three software platforms that were necessary to use the computers to, in a speedy fashion, address these issues would not cross match. And I’ve had conversations with the Secretary of Agriculture himself about this. He’s assured me that the best minds at IBM have been working diligently on it. But what it amounts to is because everything won’t speak to everything else in their computer system, they’ve had to mechanically do it, to manually fill out the forms.
“And I know that slowed the process down, and I know a lot of our neighbors out there have appointments that run over into July to have time with an FSA employee to fill out the paperwork to do it. But I would urge people: be patient, make sure you’ve got an appointment, be prompt, take the information that’s requested of you to bring. It is worth your time to do. We are pushing, encouraging USDA in Washington, D.C. to do whatever it takes to make the systems work together.

Yes, more than 20 years ago this was an issue.  Obviously Congressional "pushing" has had no effect.

The Ridiculous and the Great: What's the Difference

This is ridiculous: a post on a person who's developed the second largest drone company in the world. What the bio for Jordi Munoz at the company's site doesn't say is he started at 20 and is now 28, 

Jordi Muñoz is co-founder and CTO of 3D Robotics. He was born in Ensenada, Mexico, and raised in Tijuana. He studied briefly at Ensenada’s Center for Technical and Higher Education before moving to southern California in 2007, where in his free time he designed and built his first drone. The autopilot ran on circuitry he lifted from a Wii remote.

Soon Jordi was making a living off his ingenuity. He hacked a toaster that he bought at Target, turned it into a reflow oven, and set up a small manufacturing facility in his apartment, designing UAV parts and selling them to pilots around the world.

Jordi’s work impressed Chris Anderson—the two met virtually through the DIY Drones online community—who supported Jordi with an initial $500 check. Chris continued to advise Jordi’s production efforts over email, and in 2009 the two co-founded 3D Robotics. In 2012, Chris quit Wired to join Jordi full time.

Jordi lives with his family in San Diego

Research Using Acreage Report Data

Here's a report from a Stanford team which used acreage report data.

Lobell's team examined an unprecedented amount of detailed field data from more than 1 million USDA crop insurance records between 1995 and 2012.
"The idea was pretty simple," he said. "We determined which conditions really matter for corn and soy yields, and then tracked how farmers were doing at different levels of these conditions over time. But to do that well, you really need a lot of data, and this dataset was a beauty."

The takeaway appears to be this: "But in the past two decades we saw very small yield gains in non-irrigated corn under the hottest conditions. This suggests farmers may be pushing the limits of what's possible under these conditions."

Wonder what other conclusions could be supported by "Big Data" in the form of FSA or RMA datasets?

Line of the Day

"Also, “Man Bites Man” is always going to be an interesting story.  “Man Kills Man” is, sadly, not a novel event."

Joel Achenbach, on World Cup soccer and other diversions from serious concerns,

USDA Website and New Farmers

USDA just unveiled a new website intended to help new farmers.  I've mixed feelings about the USDA home website and the new one, but yet I don't know how you do it, "it" being to develop a website which serves all possible new farmers.  Looking at the USDA site I have a scattering of reactions.

I see USDA has yet to come up with one way to locate all offices which would serve new farmers--they still have one url for NRCS/RD/FSA service centers and a separate one for cooperative extension service.

I don't see any mention of state and local government offices which might be of concern, or government offices outside USDA (i.e., EPA, BLM).

So far, all the links to the website from the USDA home page seem to be time-driven (I'm searching for a word here--they appear in lists of radio news releases, or the slide show of current news, there's no "new farmers'' link.

If I use the search box to search for "new farmer", I get the blog posts, as well as an NAL page, but not the home page for the new farmer website.  The NAL page is also on the first page of Google results for "new farmer".  I wonder if the people heading the new farmer effort ever worked with NAL, or were aware of their effort. 

Locavore and Organic

Technology Review has a piece on LED lights in greenhouses.  Includes this surprising factoid:

Consequently, the number of commercial greenhouses and the area they occupy is rocketing. In the Netherlands, for example, greenhouses occupy around 0.25 per cent of the land area of the entire country.

 It reports on a study showing LED lights would be much cheaper than sodium lights, with the interesting possibility of tailoring the color spectrum output to match plant characteristics--certain plants use some parts of the spectrum and not others, etc.

I wonder whether greenhouse plants can be organic, if grown under unnatural lights.

NY Times February 14, 1883 Want Ads

I happened to do a search which led me to the NYTimes issue of 2/14/1883--it's only available to subscribers, apparently.  It had been a while since I'd been in their archive, which they've improved.  They now display the whole issue, which was 8 or 10 pages then.  Very business oriented stuff, lots of reports of commercial activity--shipping and prices and such.

There were some want ads, though instead of being ads of job openings, they were ads for jobs wanted, mostly by servants, maids, cooks, coachmen etc.  Not sure why the difference, or when the want ads shifted to mostly job openings.  Might make a nice paper for some aspiring historian/economist.