Revkin on Technology and Small Farms and "Factory Man"

Here's a post at the Times covering meetings on technology and small farms.

Just finished reading the book "Factory Man", on the history of the rise and fall and persistence of the furniture industry in Henry County, VA.  The factory man is John Douglas Bassett III, who's able to compete with Asian furniture makers, not on cost but on customization and speed.  So, as of now, the US factory can use automation to be more responsive to customer desires because the Asian makers are limited by the time it takes to move a container across the Pacific.  (Not sure why a manufacturer in Mexico or Central America couldn't do better than the Asians.)  So the bottom line is the mass of furniture is made in Asia, but the niche markets which require customization can still be served by US manufacturers.

I see a possible parallel with American agriculture.

Weird Fact of the Day: B-52s Versus Cruisers

The B-52 goes back to my childhood, and is still around.  From an article arguing that the Air Force should have replaced its engines with more fuel-efficient modern ones, comes this fact:

Since today’s B-52s rolled off the Wichita production line, the Navy has launched and scrapped two classes of destroyer and four cruiser classes, and that comparison makes a $550 million Long Range Strike Bomber look a little more digestible.

 Back in WWII the cost relationship and the longevity comparison between a bomber and a destroyer or cruiser would be one-sided in favor of the ship.  I suppose that's an indirect measure of the cost of electronics  versus the cost of people.

Memory and "Hang Separately"

I posted earlier   about how memory distorts historical reality.  Boston 1775 offers another instance, where the quote usually attributed to Ben Franklin about the need for rebels to hang together else they would hang separately was much earlier attributed to Richard Penn.

Hans Rosling Is a Bureaucrat

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, I got to this profile of Hans Rosling.which raised my respect for him considerably.  Rosling is famous for his presentations on world health, economic, and wellbeing statistics.  He comes off very well, and upsets many of my preconceptions.  So I already respected him

What's new from the article?  He's volunteered to go to Liberia and help on Ebola statistics.  My knee-jerk reaction (I'm a liberal so my knee jerks) is that someone so good at the big picture is likely to be inept at the nitty-gritty which bureaucrats worry about.  Not in the case of Rosling.  For example, there's a difference between showing "blank" for a county's Ebola cases and "0", a big difference. 

Farming and Consolidation, Continued

Yesterday's post included an argument that technology would not help smaller farmers compete in producing generic commodities.  As a followup, this from an Amber Waves article:

Production has shifted to larger farms in most agricultural commodity sectors over the last two decades. This consolidation has contributed to productivity growth in agriculture, leading to lower commodity and food prices and reducing total resource use in food and fiber production. As consolidation reduces the farm population, it also makes starting small and mid-sized farming operations more difficult. This is especially true for dairy farms, where a major transformation of the sector has reduced the number of dairy farms by nearly 60 percent over the past 20 years, even as total milk production increased by one-third. Recent results from the Census of Agriculture and the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) detail how and why the structure of dairy production has changed.

The "midpoint" herd size is now at 900 cows.

Farming and IT (and a Very Bad Headline)

The NYTimes has an article today on the topic of information technology and farming, focusing on an Indiana farmer, Kip Tom, who handles 20,000 acres, up from 700 acres in the 1970's. The article is not bad, hitting the big data involved in precision farming, the use of drones, the rising status of women, etc. etc.  It includes a quote from a former farmer who now is one of the 25 employees of the Tom operation, which includes 6 Tom family members.

It's titled: "Working the Land and the Data, Technology Offers Some Family Owned Farms a Chance To Thrive and Compete With Giant Agribusinesses".  While the headline is fine, the subhead is worst one I can remember in a good while.  It's based on this sentence in the article, a line which is undermined by the rest of the article: "It [technology] is also helping them grow to compete with giant agribusinesses].  The truth, more clear in the accompanying video, is that by going heavily into technology, and being smart enough to pick up land in the 1980's, when values had crashed, the Tom family were able to expand and thrive, when their neighbors went broke and sold their own operations.

Consider just the data in the article: the 20,000 acres of the current operation represents the equivalent of 28 farms in the 700 acre range from the 1970's.  And those 700 acre farms in themselves probably represented several smaller farms from the era of horsepower (which Tom's father remembers his father plowing with). Leesburg, IN, by the way, has lost about 10 percent of its population since 2000.

At the risk of over-analyzing, I suspect the writer was impressed with Mr. Tom, considered him one of the good guys.  Logically then, if he's a good guy, he must be competing with bigger operations, those soulless agribusinesses.  A good guy can't be someone who succeeds by driving others out of business.  Yes, "succeeds by driving...." is harsh, and not the way we usually think about individuals.  Because of the invisible hand of the market, it's not any one individual/enterprise bankrupting others, it's just the way things are; some people win and some people don't. 

Memory and Reality

Saw somewhere a description of a study of how well Americans remember their Presidents.  The bottom line was that we remembered the first 4, Lincoln/Johnson/Grant; FDR and not the ones in between.  The explanation was that memory is refreshed by usage--if we don't have occasion to recal Polk, we won't remember him.

That makes sense I guess, but there's also another phenomenon going on; the accumulation of true and not so true memories around certain figures.  It's something of a geological provision, some figures are built up and some torn down.

As it happens, there seems to me to be an example in A.O. Scott's review today of the new biopic on Alan Turing.  Turing is a figure who is becoming more and more prominent, partially for good reasons--his contributions to the theory of computing and to British code-breaking in WWII--and partially for understandable reasons: his homosexuality and tragic fate.  But IMHO he's getting props which are undeserved as well.  Scott writes:

" There are lines of dialogue that sound either anachronistic or — it may amount to the same thing — prophetic. It is thrilling and strange to hear the words “digital computer” uttered a half-century before any such thing existed,.... [emphasis added]

This puts him 50 years ahead of the game which isn't true.  The first mention of "digital computer" in Google ngrams is in 1940, which  is roughly when the first digital computers were being built, perhaps 4 years after Turing's big publication. There's controversy over the definitions here, but the bottomline is several people were working in the field.  But 100 years from now Turing will be remembered as the inventor of the computer just as Edison is remembered as the inventor of the light bulb.

Population Growth Versus Food Growth

According to wikipedia the average rate of growth of world population is 1.1 percent annually.  According to this farmdoc post the big US food crops have increased yield by 1.2 percent (wheat) to 2.0 percent (corn) and 2.4 percent (peanuts) over the last 40+ years.

Persnickety Grump Today

A Ph.D. does not know the difference between "cache" and "cachet":

"that Ph.D. cache..."  from a blog post on Ferguson.

Is Crop Insurance Too Inefficient?

Someone called the Landstewardship Project (seems to be based in MN/WI) put out a study attacking crop insurance as highly subsidized and highly profitable.  According to today's Farm Policy, the crop insurance industry responded by saying the figures in the report end 5 years ago, before a set of administrative changes by USDA and legislative changes in the farm bill which cut subsidies and costs.

See the article at Agriculture.com