Labels: fun

Recommendation In Brief
Eliminate commodity program payments for all newly purchased land benefiting from a
1031 tax exchange.
Problem
While many farmers are reporting significant economic hardship, land values have
continued to climb. Average farm real estate value increased over 90 percent from $974
per acre in 1998 to $1,900 per acre in 2006. During that same period, the average value of
cropland increased almost 80 percent to an average $2,390 per acre.
High land values continue to be a barrier for new farmers who are seeking to enter
production agriculture. These high land values are also problematic for small and socially
disadvantaged farmers who are seeking to expand their operations.
A reoccurring theme at USDA Farm Bill Forums centered on how individuals near urban
areas sold their land and moved to more remote areas where they outbid local farmers for
farmland, simply to take advantage of the 1031 tax exchange. For example, Troy, a 26-
year-old college graduate in agribusiness from Utah said, “It has always been my dream
to be able to someday own my own farm. Currently, I am unable to do so due to the giant
barrier of entry which is land values….This is mainly due to speculation of real estate and
1031 exchanges.” Ronald from Minnesota caused a round of applause when he stated
“it's the 1031 tax exchange that's killing the young farmer.” And Len from Wisconsin
added, “The 1031 is just driving our land rents and land prices to where the average
producer, even big producers can't compete.”

Labels: farm program, farmland

• I gotta try some Pink Lady apples. If you like Braeburn - which we do - the PL is maybe just a little more tart, but can sweeten with storage. I had never heard about them.
• The sugar beet industry is pretty puzzled about what happens next. Opening the "sugar border" to Mexico will have consequences, but it is really hard to forecast with the turmoil caused by biofuels.
• You can start a conversation with anybody in the Northwest by asking "You guys getting many Californians moving in?" I have not found anybody here who is not seeing incoming residents somewhere close.
• Potato companies were caught uncovered when the rush for acres took over. Some didn't bother to contract, relying on farmers to overproduce as usual. Result: potato prices have nearly doubled for one producer.
• You can't buy land cheap here either.
  

Labels: news

A few players now dominate our world’s turf, forage grass, and legume seed production, with the majority of trade being turf grasses (perennial ryegrass, annual ryegrass, tall fescue turf varieties, Kentucky bluegrass, and the fine leaved fescue’s). With the European Union expanding to 25 nations, lands in the newer community members may switch to grass/legume seed production. Direct subsidies to grass species in the EU have been taken off, but now the market place will play a major role in European growers decisions to grow grass/legumes seeds. This change to “Farm Based” subsidies will no longer be applied directly to a particular crop. Instead, EU growers will be growing the most profitable crop for their situation, be it grains, oilseeds, or grass/legume seed.

The marketplace has also changed. No longer do end-users obtain supply in advance. Buyers have moved to a “hand-to-mouth” approach. Obtaining supply month’s in advance is becoming the exception. This has forced growers to hold onto their production longer, thus becoming the storage component of the marketing wheel. Improvements in transportation have also allowed end users to wait before placing orders. These marketplace changes will force growers into more timely decisions. In the grass/legume seed business, growers must decide quickly when and which crop to grow, which may also mean quicker movement of growers into, and out of, grass seed production. [More]

Labels: globalization, policy

Labels: fun

Labels: blog, computer

1. Is everything now routinely leaked? Drudge posted the SOTU an hour before the President delivered it. The Iraq Study Group Report was old news when it arrived. And one broker friend thinks even crop reports are being leaked. How else to explain a limit-up close the day before the report? Why bother with a ritualistic announcement if the entire staff has been chatting with the press about it for days?
   
2. The early leak responses have been critical in that the report purportedly low-balls the effects, especially sea-level rise.

The early versions of the report predict that by 2100 the sea level will rise anywhere between 5 and 23 inches. That's far lower than the 20 to 55 inches forecast by 2100 in a study published in the peer-review journal Science this month. Other climate experts, including NASA's James Hansen, predict sea level rise that can be measured by feet more than inches.

The report is also expected to include some kind of proviso that says things could be much worse if ice sheets continue to melt.

The prediction being considered this week by the IPCC is "obviously not the full story because ice sheet decay is something we cannot model right now, but we know it's happening," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate panel lead author from Germany who made the larger prediction of up to 55 inches of sea level rise. "A document like that tends to underestimate the risk," he said.

Greenland's massive ice sheet could begin to melt this century and may disappear completely within the next thousand years if global warming continues at its present rate. According to a new climate change study, the melting of Greenland's ice sheet would raise the oceans by seven meters (23 feet), threatening to submerge cities located at sea level, from London to Los Angeles. [More]

Labels: global warming

Nineteen-fifty marks the high point of newspaper penetration in America: 100 percent of American homes took one or more daily papers. Fifty-six years later fewer than half of American homes get one. At the current rate of decline, no homes will get any newspapers in the not-too-distant future. Morning news, once the monopoly province of newspapers (virtually all evening papers, facing competition from network news, folded in the 60s and 70s), is now overwhelmingly the province of the networks, cable, radio, and the Web. Newspaper readers (as well as broadcast-news audiences) are old and growing ever older (on an actuarial table, you can plot the newspaper's last day). There are, effectively, no new newspaper readers. Newspapers have worked best as a direct-marketing medium—introducing seller to buyer—but the Web is better and cheaper. The mainstay of newspaper profits—real-estate, auto, recruitment advertising—accounting for as much as 30 percent of them, is migrating almost entirely online. Shopping itself, that other elemental commerce connection of a newspaper ("The principle of free speech owes at least as much to department stores as to the First Amendment," notes Ken Doctor in passing), is ever more an online activity. While circulation steadily drops, and as online price competition becomes fiercer, newspapers have, nevertheless, continued to charge more for ads—a kind of pyramid scheme, which, sooner rather than later, falls in on itself. [More]

Labels: media

Labels: global warming

As Canberra joined a Canadian challenge to U.S. farm subsidies on corn, Australian Trade Minister Warren Truss said that if the Doha round negotiations could not be revived, then differences would move to international courts in coming months.

"The lawyers will have a field day," Truss told Reuters in an interview before traveling to Davos, Switzerland. "The negotiators will give way to the lawyers, who will take advantage of the expiry of the so-called peace clauses to exploit elements of the U.S. and current European programs in particular." [More]

The booming demand for corn as a fuel source will make it easier for the US to agree to cuts in farm subsidies, making a new global trade agreement possible this year, the US ambassador to the EU said.

"I am very confident that we are going to get a deal,” C. Boyden Gray told reporters in Washington yesterday. "This whole alternative energy revolution is taking hold.” "This will take the whole issue of agriculture off the table as a sticking point” between the US and European Union, Gray said. Gray was in Washington for the summit between US President George W. Bush yesterday and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. Both leaders reaffirmed their support for the negotiations in the World Trade Organization.
The Doha Round talks, named for the city in Qatar where they began in 2001, broke down last July as the US resisted pledging further cuts in its farm subsidies unless India, the EU and Japan agreed to steep cuts in their agriculture tariffs. Barroso told reporters yesterday that he saw "unequivocal signals, very clear signals from President Bush, that he wants a deal for Doha.” Bush's trade negotiating authority expires at the end of June.
Gray said negotiators will try to make progress early this year, and the administration will ask Congress to extend so-called Trade Promotion Authority through the end of 2007. Negotiators "will be close enough to probably get an extension,” Gray said. Congress, "probably would not extend trade promotion authority” unless the trade talks looked promising, he said. [More]

We've heard predictions before, but as events unfold, policies that were unthinkable with corn at $2 are less repugnant at $4.

Labels: ethanol, farm program, policy, trade

Snow crystals are so perfectly symmetrical! ... Are there not some special forces at work that ensure this perfection?
People are sometimes convinced that the simple explanation of snowflake symmetry cannot be correct, because snow crystals are so perfect in form. These folks argue that the simple explanation would likely yield less ideal shapes, less perfect six-fold symmetry. Therefore they suspect something else is happening -- perhaps some acoustical or quantum mechanical oscillations are enforcing symmetrical growth, for example.

The flaw in this reasoning is the statement that snow crystals are all extremely symmetrical. You can disprove this for yourself if you simply go outside and take a close look at some falling snow. You will soon realize that the beautifully symmetrical specimens are hard to find! The rather unattractive irregular crystals are by far the most common variety (see the Guide to Snowflakes under the heading of Irregular Crystals for some pictures). Even on the best of days, I search for hours to find just a few beautifully symmetrical specimens. I typically glance over thousands of crystals on my collection board before selecting one to photograph -- so already each photograph shows the best crystal out of thousands. And the pictures you see in the Galleries are some of the best among over 6000 pictures I've taken.

Alas, the vast, vast majority of snow crystals are not even close to perfectly symmetrical. The simple mechanism does indeed produce lots of imperfect symmetry, as you would expect. Snowflake photographers always select their most symmetrical crystals to display ... we have to, because no one ever seems to be interested in looking at the irregular ones!

Labels: fun

Labels: Internet

• 25 x 25 [0r 625, for short] - This effort shoot for 25% of all energy needs to be sourced from renewable energy by 2025.

25x'25 Vision: By 2025, America's farms, forests and ranches will provide 25 percent of the total energy consumed in the United States, while continuing to produce safe, abundant, and affordable food, feed and fiber.

• 15 x 15 x 15 [3375] - This goal is to produce 15B bu. of corn turning it into 15B gal. of ethanol by 2015.

• 20 x 10 [200] - This idea is to reduce US gasoline consumption by 20% in 10 years.

Bush's proposal wouldn't be fully effective until 2017. In the meantime, motorists will have driven up gasoline consumption by about 15 percent, according to government and industry projections. While critics want more rapid conservation, plan proponents say that a 20 percent reduction by 2017 still would be significant.

• 3 x 5 - A national commitment to get 3 times more 5 year-olds on cell phones.
  
• 2 x 4 - A patriotic drive to add $2T more in national debt in 4 years. [Amazingly, this would call for much less spending!]
  
• 8 x 10 - A glossy campaign to shrink the Supreme Court by 2010. That swing vote has been such a headache!
  
• 12 x 12 - No, no - that's just gross
• 16 x 9 - A national goal to give 16 million free HDTV's to deserving citizens by 2009.

Labels: ethanol, fun, policy, politics

Labels: fun

A Fortune 50 chief executive — I won’t tell you his name because he didn’t realize I was listening to his conversation — was sitting at a fast-food restaurant with a woman who was coaching him on how to talk to the media. “You’ve got to stay on message,’” she snapped when he would forget his lines. He sheepishly apologized and then managed to mangle his line again.

“Don’t answer the question being asked,” the woman said. “Get to your message,” she said, explaining that he should use “bridge phrases” such as “meanwhile” or “what we know is” to avoid the question being asked and change the context of the answer.

“Like the politicians do,” the chief executive exclaimed.

She also emphasized what she called “flagging,” telling the C.E.O. to insert phrases such as, “the most important thing is…” and “the main idea is…”

“Journalists are looking for complete sentences,” she instructed. “Especially on TV. You want to give them full messages.”

Before they got up, she told the executive, “Tell them what you do.”

He looked at her, slightly befuddled, and replied, “What do we do?”

Labels: economics, globalization

• It is against the merchant agreements of MC, Visa, and AMEX, for a vendor to require you to provide your phone number, home address, or other personal information for credit card transactions. In fact, some states make it illegal for them to require it. (It’s not illegal to ask, but it is if they refuse to process the transaction without that information)

• Credit card numbers conform to the Luhn algorithm, which is just a simple checksum test on the number. What you do is start from the right and double each second digit (1111 becomes 2121), then add them all together, and you should end with a number evenly divisible by ten. If it doesn’t, it’s not a valid credit card number.

• The first digit of the number is the Major Industry Identifier. 1/2 are for airlines, 3 is for travel/entertainment, 4/5 for banking and financial, 6 for merchandizing and financial, 7 for petroleum, 8 for telecommunications. 0 and 9 are for other assignments but you’ll likely never see them. If you look at an American Express card, you’ll see it starts with a 3, a throwback to their travel/entertainment roots.

Labels: fun, money

"All the buzz in Washington surrounding ethanol indicates that it's going to survive," says David Lehman, managing director of the Chicago Board of Trade's commodities group.

Ethanol makers need the help. Corn prices, 75% of the cost of ethanol production, have doubled in the past six months, to more than $4 a bushel. At the same time, the price of ethanol has followed the price of gasoline downward.

Absent a rescue from Capitol Hill, the glut is going to get worse. AgResource's Basse estimates the blending demand for ethanol at 10 billion gallons, 7% of the 150 billion gallons of blended fuel burned each year. Current nationwide ethanol capacity is 5.4 billion gallons. But 6.1 billion gallons' worth of capacity is now under construction, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. That would push supply right past demand and destroy ethanol prices. Unless mandates are tightened. At the moment the motor fuel industry is meeting environmental minimums and exceeding the energy independence ones. [More]

Shares of seed producers like DuPont and Monsanto and fertilizer makers like Potash and Terra Industries are soaring. The gains have further to run, even though the stock prices exceed their five-year averages relative to earnings, said Frank Husic, chief investment officer at Husic Capital Management in San Francisco. [More]

Labels: economics, ethanol, farmland, policy

They then zapped the cleaning equipment in a microwave for varying lengths of time.

After two minutes on full power, 99% of bacteria were inactivated.

And E. coli bacteria were killed after just 30 seconds. [More]

Using only cheap, readily-available equipment, you can create a spectacular lightshow in the comfort of your very own kitchen, providing hours of fun and excitement for your family, friends, and pets!

Ordinary grapes, when properly prepared and microwaved, spark impressively in an extremely entertaining manner. [More]

Labels: food, fun

Labels: fun, politics

Unspeak, writer Steven Poole's term for a phrase or word that contains a whole unspoken political argument, deserves a place in every journalist's daily vocabulary. Such gems of unspeak, such as pro-choice and pro-life, writes Poole in the opening pages in his book Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality, represent an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem. [more]

Poole calls community one of the most perfect political words in English because it

can mean several things at once, or nothing at all. It can conjure things that don't exist, and deny the existence of those that do. It can be used in celebration, or in passive-aggressive attack. Its use in public language is almost always evidence of an Unspeak strategy at work.

The plasticity of community allows it to encompass geography, ethnicity, profession, hobby, or religion, and in the mouths of diplomats and journalists can expand to include everybody, as in the international community, a concept that Justice Antonin Scalia once described—rightly—as "fictional."

Last year, the companies made $927 million in profit, a record. They received an additional $829 million from the government in administrative fees to help run the program. On top of that, taxpayers kicked in $2.3 billion to subsidize premium payments for farmers.

All of that to pay farmers $752 million for losses from bad weather. [More]

Labels: media, policy

Labels: fun

• We can finally start cooperating at the WTO. I mean, with $4 corn who is going to whine about losing LDP's or small direct payments?

Farm subsidies: The United States has offered to cut the amounts it is allowed to spend on subsidies to farmers under WTO rules by 60 percent. But the European Union and leading developing countries say that it could still spend over $22 billion a year, more than 2005 spending of some $19.5 billion. It is widely assumed that the United States has at least a further $5 billion of cuts up its sleeve made up of so-called “product-specific de minimis” support, which it rarely uses.

The United States is also under pressure to tighten disciplines in the so-called “blue box”, which is a half-way house between farm aid that is considered trade-distorting and aid that is not, like rural development spending.

The EU, which spends far more, has offered a 70 percent cut in subsidies, but could go to 75 percent if the United States went to 65. [More] [Another view]

• We won't have to worry about cotton farmers or ranchers or livestock producers, but can just throw 'em under the bus as we all produce for wildly expanded mandated markets. Southern producers are not idiots - they are already gaming the shift from cotton to corn. And no doubt scientists will come up with new hybrids or something those guys can grow instead.

The Energy Future Coalition, a Washington-based proponent of alternative fuels, said yesterday that the group expects Bush will call for more than 60 billion gallons a year to be blended with U.S. gasoline by 2030, up from the 7.5 billion by 2012 mandated by current law. [More]

• Agribusinesses will be ecstatic as demand for fertilizer, machinery, seed, etc. will be huge. My guess is we're going to need a bunch of trucks and roads to move all that stuff from where it is to where it is needed as well. If not, Iowa could soon be knee-deep in DDG's.
  

Labels: ethanol, farm bill

1. Providing all the medical care we now have to everybody.
2. Including the growing number of "uninsurables" (thanks to rapidly improving screening such as genetic testing) outside groups or self-employed.

Labels: economics, health, insurance

Labels: fun

But my favorite is a Discovery On Demand channel, which has a series called "Sunrise Earth." Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Put down the bong. But you need no bong to be entranced by the simplicity of the series. It takes the highest quality video cameras around the world and captures 50-minute scenes of the dawn in a variety of spots on this water-planet. There is no narration; no music; just natural sounds. Here's one review:

When seen in vivid, crystal-clear HDTV, the effect is hypnotic. Few viewers will fail to have an impulse to immediately book a flight to join the fun. After watching last night's program on the Cadillac Mountains at the Acadia National Park in Maine, I quickly checked my work schedule for vacation dates. When seen in high-def, the burnt orange skies lingering over the Maine mountains was enough to make me forget, well, nearly everything.

Again, like Kubrick's "Dawn of Man," Sunrise Earth lets the high-def pictures do the talking. There is no narrator getting in the way; only an occasional graphic reveals the location and the time of day. It's a powerful technique. By eliminating the human altogether, Sunrise Earth makes you feel like what you're seeing could be what you would have seen hundreds of years ago. It's nature unplugged.

Labels: TV

• Here in Illinois (Rex Grossman for President!) we about to start paying full price for electricity after a mandated freeze. Politicians are sorting themselves out and a helpful "consumer" group has emerged to inform the public about this proposed rate hike.

• In New York, PETA is being attacked by a similar "consumer group"

There's a very public PR campaign (full page ads in today's New York Times, billboards in Times Square) attacking PETA. Click on their website and hit about us, and you'll find a link. Two more clicks and you find:

The Center for Consumer Freedom is supported by restaurants, food companies and more than 1,000 concerned individuals. From farm to fork, our friends and supporters include businesses, employees and consumers.

The Wikipedia article sheds a bit more light, pointing out that a cigarette company was the initial sponsor of the group and that fast food restaurants are funders as well. Millions of dollars worth of funding from a few giant corporations. [More]

Labels: blog, media

Meatlifting is a grave problem for food retailers: According to the Food Marketing Institute, meat was the most shoplifted item in America's grocery stores in 2005. (It barely edged out analgesics and was a few percentage points ahead of razor blades and baby formula.)

Meat's dubious triumph is due in part to a law enforcement crackdown on methamphetamine use. Meat used to be the shoplifting runner-up to health-and-beauty-care items, a category that includes cough medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in home-cooked meth. In 2003, for example, a quarter of shoplifted products were HBCs, while meat took second place at 16 percent. But states began passing laws that require stores to move medicines containing pseudoephedrine behind secure counters. That was enough to cut the pinching of HBCs, which fell by 11 percent between 2003 and 2005.

Labels: beef, retail

We climb to 2,000 feet and head toward the densest concentration of hogs in the world. The landscape at first is unsuspiciously pastoral -- fields planted in corn or soybeans or cotton, tree lines staking creeks, a few unincorporated villages of prefab houses. But then we arrive at the global locus of hog farming, and the countryside turns into an immense subdivision for pigs. Hog farms that contract with Smithfield differ slightly in dimension but otherwise look identical: parallel rows of six, eight or twelve one-story hog houses, some nearly the size of a football field, containing as many as 10,000 hogs, and backing onto a single large lagoon. From the air I see that the lagoons come in two shades of pink: dark or Pepto Bismol -- vile, freaky colors in the middle of green farmland.

From the plane, Smithfield's farms replicate one another as far as I can see in every direction. Visibility is about four miles. I count the lagoons. There are 103. That works out to at least 50,000 hogs per square mile. You could fly for an hour, Dove says, and all you would see is corporate hog operations, with little towns of modular homes and a few family farms pinioned amid them.

Labels: environment, pork