GMO Soybeans for Everyone

One of the big accusations against industrial agriculture is the fact that patented seeds must be purchased each year from the seed company.  This is a burden on smaller farms with tighter margins.

But patents are not forever.  It turns out some of Monsanto's GMO patents are expiring.  Technology Review has a report on a seed dealer who took advantage of the fact, selling GMO soybeans no longer under patent.  As the article observes, this means the farmer can use some of his harvest to plant next year.

Dairy and Efficiency and Meat

Nathanael Johnson at Grist has a piece on how to make meat greener.   The answer: be efficient--two quotes.

The average dairy cow in California produces 20,000 pounds of milk a year. But the average dairy cow in Mexico produces only 4,000 pounds of milk a year, while in India it’s just 1,000 pounds. 

The carbon footprint of American milk is 63 percent lower than in 1944, researchers have calculated.

Interesting throughout. (Same piece as the previous post on salmon.)

In the 1950's I think we were doing good at about 12,000 pounds, which was well above average for the county.

How To Make Something From Nothing: Feed Salmon

"As long as we are talking about fish farming, we should note that a genetically engineered salmon can produce a pound of fish for every .83 pounds of feed it eats"

From this

Rural Utilities Service Gets Dinged

Politico has a long piece detailing problems with RUS implementation of subsidies for rural broadband.

I'd note the absence of USDA management from the discussion.

A Quote on Todo

From a discussion of historians storage of data on hard drives, etc.:

I once looked at my working directories saved from a previous machine for the first time in five or so years. Among them was an ASCII file called todo.txt. The amount of overlap with the current version was distressing.

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/07/24/postscarcitymentaleconomy/

A lot of the comments described keeping lots of old files and never looking at them.  That's me.

Wasting Food

Grist has the John Oliver video on the subject--as usual quite funny.   There's an interesting bit with a farmer at a farmers market noting that it's difficult to sell the last item in the last hour.  People like to choose, and they look askance at things which people before them have not chosen. Particularly with produce there's got to be some differences among items, so the last one left likely is the least desirable, and who wants to buy the least desirable?

Misleading Post Title at Technology Review

Why do I say this title,
Robotic Surgery Linked To 144 Deaths Since 2000 is misleading?

Because it turns out that if the surgical patient died after surgery, it was included in the 144. But presumably some patients are going to die after surgery using any procedures, robotic, manual, or extra-terrestial.  The meaningful comparison would be the rates of death after surgery using comparable illnesses/situations.

Mom Is Rolling in Her Grave--Egg Prices

I guess it was standard in the 30's-50's for the farm wife to handle chickens, while her spouse did the "farming".  My family was standard-issue in some ways and my mother was emotionally invested in her hens, both in terms of their importance in our economic enterprise and the value to humans of eggs, the most perfect food and the cheapest source of protein in these United States.

So my mother is rolling in her grave at this Post piece--a Wonkblog post entitled "Eggs Are No Longer the Cheapest Source of Protein".  Egg prices have increased due to the effects of the virus.

A side note: the piece includes a chart of egg prices going back to 1965. They're now at 535 percent of the 65 prices.  I think the cost of my college education has rise about 2000 percent in the same period.

Hispanic and Women Farmers and Ranchers Claims

Not sure what to make of these figures. A newspaper summary:

According to a report filed on behalf of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack by his Office of General Counsel, with the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, the USDA approved 3,210 of the 22,163 (14.4%) timely and completed discrimination claims that they received from Hispanic and Women Farmers and Ranchers (HWFR).
USDA awarded cash damages, forgiveness of eligible USDA farm debt and tax relief totaling over $200 million to 706 Hispanic farmers and 2,504 female farmers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. The USDA had initially set aside $1.3 billion for payments under this settlement.

Here's the website and the status report


The results are very different from those in the Pigford case.  I'm not sure how to interpret the differences: different standards for the application process, different review process, different dynamics among the applicants, all of the above, something else?  And why the big overestimate by USDA? 

The Loss of Old Organizations

When we did our weekly shopping in Greene, NY, one of our regular stops was the A&P.  It used to be the big grocery chain.  Now it's gone.