A Warning on Locavore

In 1840 Ireland was primarily locavore, organic agriculture.

This piece from extension.org reminds us of the problems of such agriculture

"Late blight, a potentially devastating disease of tomato and potato, has been found in Ohio and may threaten home gardens and commercial operations alike — particularly as wet, cool weather conditions this week in most of the Buckeye state will create a favorable environment for the spread of the fungal pathogen that causes this disease.[It's the disease which caused the Great Famine in Ireland.]"

One of the limitations of local agriculture is its vulnerability to local weather, local disease, local earthquakes.

More Transparency Than We Need?

Transparency is on my mind, given the Obama initiative on it. We're all in favor of transparency, it's a good thing. But good things can be carried too far.

NYTimes has a piece about Air New Zealand, titled: Nothing to Hide, Really:

"The instructions in Air New Zealand’s new in-flight safety video are given by employees who are nude except for body paint and strategically placed seat belts."

There is, after all, a reason we mostly have doors on bathrooms.

Those Arches

Here's the front page photo of the Washington Post this morning--captioned as showing a supporter of the ousted president near the presidential palace.. Note the golden arches in the upper left.

Women Farmers

The Post runs an article describing the number of women who are now farming, mostly people who changed careers to farm, often with a mate who retains a city job.

" "In Maryland, the number of farms in which a woman is the principal operator jumped 16 percent between 2002 and 2007. In Virginia, female-run farms also grew by 16 percent."....

While men tend to run larger farms focused on such commodity crops as soybeans and wheat, women tend to run smaller, more specialized enterprises selling heirloom tomatoes and grass-fed beef to well-heeled, eco-conscious consumers.

These smaller enterprises have gotten a boost from the popularity of farmers markets and programs in which people pay in advance to receive weekly produce baskets, as well as renewed consumer interest in buying locally."

The Public Option for Insurance

Prof. Mankiw of Harvard has a column in tomorrow's Times (yes, for once I'm getting a jump on the news) on the case against the "public option" in a national health care program; running a government health care insurance program alongside the private programs.

He's much better educated than I, so I should not disagree with him. But that only sometimes has stopped me from voicing opinions.

I'd point out to the good professor that the US has already run an experiment of having private insurance plans and government plans side by side. And what happened? Was the professor's prediction that the government would be "virtually the only game in town" fulfilled?

No. We've had parallel crop insurance programs ever since the FCIC was created towards the end of the New Deal because it was felt private insurance plans didn't do the job. And government did not drive out the private companies; today there is no government insurance operation, just private plans, albeit heavily subsidized by the government.

Mankiw's mistake is to assume there would be a straight competition on economic grounds between the private and government options. Not so. There would be a continuing political/economic struggle in which the private companies would have the advantage. Once the push for national health care is over, the public will lose interest and focus and the role and power of the special interests will return to the fore. In that struggle, government will be the loser.

NY Times on Animal ID

The Times has a rather sympathetic story on the resistance to the National Animal Identification System here. Cites a New Mexico rancher and a couple others, with a pro forma defense from Hammerschmidt.

Proud To Be a New Yorker

Yes, my mother was very proud. New York was the best state around, having the most people and best places to live (that is, excluding the city). It's declined in the rankings over the years since her time but I'm glad to see it's now taking the lead in one very important area, a field where Nebraska is the last but New York is now the first: the number of houses in the state legislature. NY now has three, the Assembly, the Democratic Senate, and the Republican Senate. See this NYTimes article.

(The background is a closely divided body, in which people of dubious achievement have switched back and forth, leading to a comedy of competing leaderships. Mark Twain would have thoroughly enjoyed the situation. The rest of us, not so much.)

$450 Mill for FSA IT

Via Keith Good's FArm Policy, here's the FFAS Under Secretary James Miller talking about FSA IT. Total bill, estimated $450,000,000.

Best Sentence of the Day

From Ta-Nehisi Coates, from a post discussing reaction to the Sanford: "What good is marriage if it doesn't humble men?" Mr. Coates believes in humility. (So do I.)

Wrong Again, on Carbon Sequestration

House Ag has the text of the agricultural amendments to the carbon bill. (There's also a summary.) I was wrong in my assumptions on how it might work--I was figuring a direct NRCS to farmer linkage. Not so, instead there's provision for "offset project developers" and "independent offset verifiers" which sound like private entities. So the NRCS would be working through these third parties. (This is based on a fast skim and I don't claim any expertise in the area.)

Seems to me this is partially political. (I know you're surprised.) By using third parties you increase the chance of getting influential supporters and contributors on board. Use a government agency, you only get the agency's employees. [Updated: Did I ever link to the National Farmer's Union testimony? They're currently acting, I think, as an offset project developer. They've got an interesting website application show in the testimony as well.]

Because I'm on the weak government kick recently, I'll go on to say this is an example of how and why we end up with weak government (otherwise known as protecting our liberties); the process of getting legislation enacted requires logrolling and obeisance to local power centers.