Say you woke up one day and your bed was gone. Your room, too. Gone. It's all gone. You wake up in an inky void. Not even a star. Okay, yes, it's a dumb idea, but just go with it. Now say you want to know if you move or not. Are you held fast in one spot? Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see that, sure. You don't need me to tell you. To move, you have to move to or away from ... well, from what? You'd have to say that you don't even get to use a word like "move" when you are the only body in that void. Sure. Okay. Now, let's add the bed back. Your bed is with you in the void. But not for long -- it goes away from you. You don't have any way to get it back, so you just let it go. But so now we have a body in the void with you. So does the bed move, or do you move? Or both? Well, you can see as well as I that it can go any way you like. Flip a coin. Who's to say? It's best to just say that you move away from the bed, and that the bed goes away from you. No one can say who's held fast and who isn't. [More]

Labels: fun, physics

Labels: fun, photo

Power firm E.ON said the development five miles (8km) off the Humber estuary would be capable of providing electricity to almost 200,000 homes. [More]

Wind power plants, or wind farms as they are sometimes called, are clusters of wind machines used to produce electricity. A wind farm usually has dozens of wind machines scattered over a large area. The world's largest wind farm, the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Texas, has 421 wind turbines that generate enough electricity to power 230,000 homes per year. [More]

In 2005, wind machines in the United States generated a total of 17.8 billion kWh per year of electricity, enough to serve more than 1.6 million households. This is enough electricity to power a city the size of Chicago, but it is only a small fraction of the nation's total electricity production, about 0.4 percent. The amount of electricity generated from wind has been growing fast in recent years, tripling since 1998.

Reasonable people can disagree on the merits of putting turbines on Nantucket Sound, as proposed by a private company. Though costs have come down to 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour from 6.1 per KWH in 1999, the technology is still not balancing out as cost-effective for some areas. Last week, Long Island scratched its plans to build a wind energy center in the Atlantic when costs were running up toward $800 million. Projects in windy Texas have also been scrapped over cost considerations.

But advocates often tout renewable energy not for its economics, but because it's virtuous. Many of those who are willing to impose the costs of various environmental schemes on other Americans based on "ideals" suddenly have started looking more closely at the tradeoffs when something they hold dear would have to be sacrificed, like a nice view. Wind energy is never going to be anything but a bit player in meeting the world's energy needs. The Nantucket tempest is useful mainly as a real-world test of whether some of the world's most privileged liberals wear their ideals all the time, or only when it suits them. [More]

Labels: energy, fun

Labels: fun

Though poorly known, radiation breeding has produced thousands of useful mutants and a sizable fraction of the world’s crops, Dr. Lagoda said, including varieties of rice, wheat, barley, pears, peas, cotton, peppermint, sunflowers, peanuts, grapefruit, sesame, bananas, cassava and sorghum. The mutant wheat is used for bread and pasta and the mutant barley for beer and fine whiskey.

The mutations can improve yield, quality, taste, size and resistance to disease and can help plants adapt to diverse climates and conditions.

Dr. Lagoda takes pains to distinguish the little-known radiation work from the contentious field of genetically modified crops, sometimes disparaged as “Frankenfood.” That practice can splice foreign genetic material into plants, creating exotic varieties grown widely in the United States but often feared and rejected in Europe. By contrast, radiation breeding has made few enemies.

“Spontaneous mutations are the motor of evolution,” Dr. Lagoda said. “We are mimicking nature in this. We’re concentrating time and space for the breeder so he can do the job in his lifetime. We concentrate how often mutants appear — going through 10,000 to one million — to select just the right one.” [More]

Lagoda who irradiates plants to produce mutants is being somewhat disingenuous when he says, "I’m not doing anything different from what nature does." True, mutations occur in nature all of the time, but it seems somewhat doubtful that plants out in a field experience anywhere near the number of uncharacterized mutations produced in a lab by gamma rays.

If anti-biotechies are so afraid of genetic changes in their foods, why aren't they out protesting varieties produced by means of mutation breeding? After all, most biotech crops merely change agronomic characteristics, whereas many irradiated varieties have different nutritional profiles.

The point here is NOT that mutation breeding is inherently dangerous. Given a solid record of 80 years of safety, it's not. The point is that the more precise methods of modern gene-splicing are even safer and should therefore be subject to even less regulation than crops produced by mutation breeding. [More]

Labels: biotech, GM

Yesterday the U.N. announced that opium production in Afghanistan hit a record level this year. You may feel as if you've read this news before: Opium production in Afghanistan also hit a record level last year. This year 193,000 hectares of poppies were cultivated, up 17 percent from last year's 165,000. Thanks to favorable weather that led to high yields, opium production rose even more, from about 6,700 tons in 2006 to about 9,000 tons this year, an increase of 34 percent. The U.N. says Afghanistan's opium now represents 93 percent of the world total, compared to 92 percent last year. [More]

Labels: drugs

But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.

Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.

Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics. [More of a brilliant NYT article]

Labels: environment, pork, trade

Years ago I learned something about aging -- that it wasn't so much the date of your birth but the place you were living in that determined whether or not you were old. There was a geography of aging in America. I began to notice this when I moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in the nineteen seventies and stayed there through the nineties working as a script writer for various studios. I don't have any East Coast snobbery about the culture or lack of it in LA: nice, sentient, intelligent, art loving, caring people actually live there -- but it became clear to me that every time I returned home to New York to visit my folks I felt ten years younger, and every time I stepped out of the terminal at LAX I aged a decade. At first I didn't have a clue as to why that was happening -- I figured that it wasn't just because my parents still viewed me as their youngest child in New York it was the LA experience. I eventually learned that one became an official senior citizen at fifty in Los Angeles, and New York was holding fast to sixty five. Sure, I could get into movies cheaper, but in LA people canvassing in malls failed to ask my opinion on any topic -- I was outside the cherished demographic of 18-40. Then it happened. When I reached fifty nine, my important LA agent called me into his office and sadly, gently fired me -- noting that although I had many awards for writing, indeed too many which gave away the length of my career, and I was a helluva nice guy, he couldn't sell me to the studios or the networks. The message the agent conveyed was that I was old news... out of touch with the zeitgeist... incapable of understanding or creating what America wanted -- an America dominated by the young, and the youth worshipers. As the father of two young sons I was stunned by this -- I felt I knew more about how young people felt and acted than most young people. But the tide was too strong to fight it, and I soon went to Germany to work on a film, and later managed to do a series for the BBC. [More]

Labels: culture, future, rural life

Camp and bad French aside, the lighthearted marketing video articulates a watershed moment in the global wine industry: after hundreds of years of tradition, more and more winemakers are turning away from cork closures — and oenophiles are finally getting used to the idea. Bonny Doon, a boutique winery south of San Francisco, had used Portuguese cork for 19 years, but was losing 0.5% to 2% of its wine to "taint" — the unmistakably moldy or musty smell and taste of a contaminated wine, caused by a compound called TCA, which is sometimes found in cork. So, the winery decided to make a change in 2002. "It's not a lot, but it's enough," says Burke Owens, Bonny Doon's marketing director, of the switch to screwcaps. As the sommelier puts it: "The days of the cork are numbered." [More]

Labels: culture, food, fun

Sodas sweetened with high fructose corn syrup contain high levels of a potentially dangerous compound often found in the blood of diabetics, a new study concludes.

It could be cause for concern, experts say, because the "reactive carbonyls" in these sugary drinks could bump up diabetes risk, particularly in children. [More]

Bottled water sales in the U.S. have skyrocketed in recent years, and with it consumers aren't making a concerted effort to recycle, adding more plastic to the nation's garbage dumps.

An environmental movement is mounting in some states against the one-and-done nature of bottled water, and negative myths about tap water quality. [More]

Labels: culture, environment, food

Mr. Bush comes to this fight with an understanding of how Schip has played out in the states, which is why his administration recently instituted reforms to the program that aim to restrict eligibility to those it was originally intended to serve -- the truly needy -- and not provide an incentive for middle class parents to drop their private health insurance. Moreover, he has threatened to veto federal legislation that would allow states to expand their Schip programs.

It would be easy for Mr. Bush to give in on this fight. He is, after all, in the twilight of his administration. But next month, he'll square off against Congress to oppose an incremental advance of socialized medicine. We are fortunate he is today willing to do so at a time when Republicans in his home state were quick to abandon the fight. [More]

Labels: farm bill, farm program, policy

Labels: blog, economics

A driver who was high on cocaine destroyed an entire cornfield in an attempt to escape from the police. Four police cars were destroyed before the 35-year-old crashed into a ditch and was arrested, near the village of Dussen in the south of the Netherlands.

Labels: fun, photo

It goes against the grain for farm subsidies to be handed out to the rich. But that's precisely what the House version of the next farm bill does -- it continues big handouts to wealthy farmers and landowners. It's going to be up to the Senate to get it right when Congress resumes next month.

Under the current farm bill, which expires this year, subsidies to farmers are cut off if their yearly incomes are above $2.5 million. The $286 billion, five-year House bill lowers that limit to $1 million -- an improvement, but far higher than the $200,000 limit suggested by President Bush and the $250,000 cap contained in a "Fairness Amendment" that was defeated on the House floor. Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't support tougher reforms because she was trying to protect some first-term farm-state Democrats. [More]

It goes against the grain for farm subsidies to be handed out to the rich. But that's precisely what the House version of the next farm bill does -- it continues big handouts to wealthy farmers and landowners. It's going to be up to the Senate to get it right when Congress resumes next month.

Under the current farm bill, which expires this year, subsidies to farmers are cut off if their yearly incomes are above $2.5 million. The $286 billion, five-year House bill lowers that limit to $1 million -- an improvement, but far higher than the $200,000 limit suggested by President Bush and the $250,000 cap contained in a "Fairness Amendment" that was defeated on the House floor. Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't support tougher reforms because she was trying to protect some first-term farm-state Democrats. [More]

Gosh, golly - you'd think with all this editorial outrage Congresshumans would be scrambling to build a better farm policy. Well, citizen, you would be wrong. As we saw in the House, reform is the last thing on Senate leaders' minds.

There is no change in the big ticket item in this farm bill cycle: $26 billion in direct payments, a leftover from "freedom to farm" payment contracts begun in 1996 that will be made, regardless of crop prices, over the next 5 years. Chairman Harkin has repeatedly criticized direct payments as "hard to justify" when crop prices are high, as they are now, and farmers will be making good money (in some cases record money) in the marketplace.

But with this draft he formally endorses continuing those very payments at the same level. He (suddenly) indicated he would do this a few weeks ago, just after Speaker Pelosi's House farm bill did the same.

They're simply accepting the reality that this is what every major farm and commodity group wants. And that's probably the most important take-away from this farm bill cycle. [More]

Regardless of your position the sheer immobility of farm policy would seem to demonstrate some powerful lessons:

• There are more people than just farmers benefiting from those billions. The idea that a few hundred thousand voters who split their votes unpredictably can reliably raid the Treasury would be mildly believable if we were cunning financiers, but we're farmers, fer crying out loud! My theory is the farm lobby is so whackin' huge it has become the tail that wags the dog. Indeed, an interesting economic study could be made of the net proceeds to farmers after the effort of feeding these K street mouths is subtracted.
• If you need proof of the dwindling readership and clout of the print media, this is Exhibit A. Following this argument the slow motion train-wreck that is the Chicago Tribune is hardly a surprise.
• If change should miraculously come, it would be shattering to a number of institutions and arguably due to on-line campaigning for change. Not this blog, necessarily, but a much wider spread network of reform activists who have finally found a outlet.

Labels: farm bill, farm program, media

Tragic accidents on the farm were all too common last year, claiming the lives of 19 people, according to statistics from the Danish Agricultural Advisory Service and the Agricultural Working Conditions Board.

The 2006 figure is equal to the number of deaths from 2001-2005 combined. Among the 19 deaths were three children.

‘It is often older workers that lose their lives, but the farmers’ children are also killed on occasion by the heavy machinery,’ the board’s joint secretary, Anne Marie Hagelskjær, told employee union 3F. ‘The sharp increase in the number of agricultural accidents is extremely worrying.’

The four principle causes of farm accidents are falls, unattended children, machinery and farm vehicles in traffic. [More]

Labels: rural life, safety

To be fair, we excluded community colleges, technical schools, and the kind of places that advertise in subway cars, limiting our search to accredited four-year institutions with brick-and-mortar campuses. We started by gathering statistics on academic offerings, admissions, and student life from a diverse array of sources, including Princeton Review, U.S. News, and the U.S. Department of Education. Then we factored in criteria like low SAT scores, incompetent professors, rock-bottom admissions standards, unbridled alcohol and drug consumption, rampant criminal activity, and dubious alumni. To complete the picture, we added reviews from online outlets like Students Review, Campus Dirt, and College Prowler. Finally, we tallied up the numbers in a variety of categories, ranging from worst Ivy to worst party school, and of course, the very worst college in the country. (Hint: The Moonies are involved.) Below, the nine colleges that made our dishonor roll. [More of a great read]

Labels: education, fun

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $268.32. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access the form for your tax refund, please click here

Regards,
Internal Revenue Service
© Copyright 2007, Internal Revenue Service U.S.A. All rights reserved.

1. It's almost all land.
2. The meager amount of cash is guarded by people who know how I write my name, spend my money, and sound like on the phone. Heck, I took square-dancing lessons with the bank president. (Very funny - HER name is Connie).

Labels: Internet, money

Labels: blog

The US is reviewing its federal Renewable Fuel Standard, which calls for the production of 7.5bn gallons a year of alternative fuels by 2012. This is expected to be reached well ahead of target, and the Bush administration has called for a benchmark of 35bn gallons by 2017, about half of it from ethanol.

Bill Veazey, Cargill's chief financial officer, said there needed to be "some kind of waiver" in any state-backed mandate. "There needs to be escape mechanisms so that you don't distort the food markets," he told the Financial Times.

Cargill said three of its five divisions delivered record results, and played down the importance of its asset management business, which has been the largest contributor to earnings in recent years.

"What we have is a broader and more diversified earnings' stream than last year," said Mr Veazey, pointing to the restructuring of the financial services business into two standalone entities, which have secured third-party investors to reduce Cargill's exposure.

However, Cargill's heavy investment programme - which it will continue to fund internally - and the potential volatility of financial services income have prompted ratings agencies to shift their outlooks for the group to negative in recent months. [More]

Labels: economics, ethanol, taxes

Labels: fun

While Mr Paulson sought to reassure Americans yesterday that the economy was strong, Mr Dodd warned that up to 3 million people were in danger of losing their homes in the fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis. "I would urge every possible step to be taken to keep people in their homes," said Senator Dodd, describing the likely rate of foreclosures as "deeply, deeply troubling".

For many new homeowners, low-interest "teaser" rates fixed in 2004 and 2006 will expire later this year. Senator Dodd said that in some cases, repayments would leap from $400 to $1,500 a month. He added that when a home is repossessed in an economically vulnerable area, the value of nearby properties slumps by up to $5,000. "Think of all the ripple effects," he said. "If we don't deal with this, it could spill over and become more serious." [More]

Already-battered U.S. auto sales could be the next victim of the problems with mortgages, declining home and stock prices as potential car buyers delay purchases due to uncertainty.

Industrywide U.S. auto sales in August could be off 10 percent from a year ago, according to an early read from sales tracker Edmunds.com. That follows July sales that were 19 percent below year-earlier levels.

Jesse Toprak, executive director of industry analysis for Edmunds.com, said that the downturn in home values and credit issues that were seen in the July numbers could be an even bigger factor this month.

"I think the issue is becoming more pronounced," he said. [More]

Labels: economics, finance, future

Labels: blog, Farm Journal

The World Bank study defines natural capital as the sum of cropland, pastureland, forested areas, protected areas, and nonrenewable resources (including oil, natural gas, coal, and minerals). Produced capital is what most of us think of when we think of capital: machinery, equipment, structures (including infrastructure), and urban land. But that still left a lot of wealth to explain. "As soon as you say the issue is the wealth of nations and how wealth is managed, then you realize that if you were only talking about a portfolio of natural assets, if you were only talking about produced capital and natural assets, you're missing a big chunk of the story," Hamilton explains.

The rest of the story is intangible capital. That encompasses raw labor; human capital, which includes the sum of a population's knowledge and skills; and the level of trust in a society and the quality of its formal and informal institutions. Worldwide, the study finds, "natural capital accounts for 5 percent of total wealth, produced capital for 18 percent, and intangible capital 77 percent."

Social institutions are most crucial. The World Bank has devised a rule of law index that measures the extent to which people have confidence in and abide by the rules of their society. An economy with a very efficient judicial system, clear and enforceable property rights, and an effective and uncorrupt government will produce higher total wealth. For example, Switzerland scores 99.5 out of 100 on the rule of law index and the U.S. hits 91.8. By contrast, Nigeria gets a score of just 5.8, while the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo obtains a miserable 1 out of 100. The members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-30 wealthy developed countries- have an average score of 90, while sub-Saharan Africa's is 28. "Rich countries are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting economic activity," the study concludes. According to Hamilton's figures, the rule of law explains 57 percent of countries' intangible capital. Education accounts for 36 percent. [More of a great interview]

Labels: economics, wealth

Now comes another woe, this one as icky as a biblical plague: millions of mouse-like rodents called voles feasting on everything from beets to potatoes in an infestation that has prompted a desperate, scorched-earth policy in one of Spain's agricultural heartlands.

Farmers unions say the Castille-Leon region in north-central Spain is crawling with an estimated 7.5 million voles, and the local government is baffled: It doesn't know the cause — or the solution. The invasion began gently 10 months ago but has snowballed to stunning proportions.

Spanish television aired footage of scores of voles darting in and out of holes in what would normally be rich, healthy farmland, or quivering in the throes of death brought on by pesticide. Some of the critters have even made it into gardens of homes in the region's main city, Valladolid, according to news reports. [More]

Labels: ethanol

Commodity investors may never have a better time to buy corn, cotton and sugar instead of oil and copper.

Sugar, the world's primary source of ethanol, is the cheapest it has ever been relative to crude oil. Corn this year dropped the most since 1998 after U.S. farmers planted the biggest crop since World War II. Cotton is the worst commodity investment over the past three years.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the world's biggest securities firm, is recommending corn after correctly predicting a rally earlier this year. Former hedge fund manager Jim Rogers and Marc Faber, who told investors to sell U.S. stocks a week before the 1987 crash, also say agricultural commodities are the ones to buy. Wheat, coffee and corn this month outperformed almost all commodities in the UBS Bloomberg CMCI index. Oil tumbled 8 percent and copper fell to the lowest price since March as loan losses hurt consumer demand. [More]

The culprits were not the typical ones — heat waves, fires or drought — but thieves, who have been stripping the copper wires out of irrigation systems throughout California. The rampant thefts have left farmers without functioning water pumps for days and weeks at a time, creating financial loss and occasional crop devastation in a region still smarting from a spectacular freeze last winter.

Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of American life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper resulting from a building boom in Asia. Common in developing counties, metal theft is now committed in nearly every state, largely by methamphetamine users who hock the metal to buy drugs, the authorities say.

Thieves have stripped the wires out of phone lines, pulled plaques off cemetery plots, raided air-conditioning systems in schools and yanked catalytic converters from cars, all to be resold to scrap metal recyclers.

But perhaps no group has been as been as consistently singled out as California farmers, who provide roughly half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. Irrigation systems, a treasure trove of copper, tend to be in remote places, out of the eyes of farmers and, until recently, law enforcement. [More]

Labels: economics, money

Labels: food, fun

• we are getting less from Iraq than in 2006
• we are getting more from Russia
  
• we are getting more from Algeria
• Saudi Arabia has replaced Mexico as #2
• Mexican production is slumping seriously.

Labels: ethanol

The chemistry of dreams goes back to before biochemistry began.

Scrooge blamed his nocturnal ghosts on a "crumb of cheese", and I know what he meant. I find it almost impossible to get an undisturbed night's sleep after eating the stuff and - worse - after drinking red wine.

The effect is very real - the last time I tried a refreshing bottle of red late at night I ground my teeth so hard that I smashed a molar.

Now the substances behind such unwanted nightmares are being tracked down. Tyramine, the main culprit, is based on the carbon ring of Kekulé's dream, and is broken down by the same enzymes as those hard at work during paradoxical sleep.

Aged cheeses, like Stilton, and heavy red wines are most to blame, while soy sauce and smoked fish are both rich in the stuff. [More]

85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most unusual dreams of the whole study. 65% of people eating Cheddar dreamt about celebrities, over 65% of participants eating Red Leicester revisited their schooldays, all female participants who ate British Brie had nice relaxing dreams whereas male participants had cryptic dreams, two thirds of all those who ate Lancashire had a dream about work and over half of Cheshire eaters had a dreamless sleep.

Commenting on the study, Neil Stanley, PhD Director of Sleep Research HPRU Medical Research Centre at the University of Surrey says: "The Cheese and Dreams study conducted by the British Cheese Board is the first study of its kind and suggests that eating cheese before you go to bed may actually aid a good night’s sleep.

What is particularly interesting is the reported effect different types of British cheese have on influencing the content of dreams. It seems that selecting the type of cheese you eat before bedtime may help determine the very nature of often colourful and vivid cheese induced dreams” [More]

This is all well and good for the Brits. But my question is will a Double Cheese Whopper make me dream about Carol Drinkwater and me surfing off Baja California?

It's all about science, ya know.

Labels: food, fun, health, science

Labels: computer, Internet, technology

Labels: fun

In the U.S., as of December, 2006, M1 was about $1.37 trillion and M2 was about $7.02 trillion. If you split all of the money equally per person in the United States, each person would end up with roughly $4,550 ($1,370,000M/301M) using M1 or $23,320 ($7,020,000M/301M) using M2. The amount of actual physical cash, M0, was $80 billion in 2006, roughly one third of the $261 billion in cash and cash equivalents on deposit at Citigroup as of the end of that year and roughly $266 per person in the US. [More]

Labels: economics

Labels: fun

There's a strange moon whizzing around Saturn that's shaped, oddly, like a walnut.

Now astronomers find that Iapetus got its nutty shape from a super-fast spin that was frozen into place early in the solar system's formation.

When the Cassini spacecraft snapped close-ups of Saturn's moons in 2005, it revealed a bulging waistline of rock along the equator of the now slowly spinning Iapetus. Astronomers think this characteristic shape persists because Iapetus was cryogenically frozen in time about 3 billion years ago, during the moon's "teen" years. [More]

Labels: fun, science, space

DirecTV said it would bundle broadband-over-powerline high-speed Internet and VoIP with its digital TV services to about 1.8 million homes in the Dallas-Forth Worth, Texas region by early 2008. Benefits of broadband-over-powerline include faster upload and download speeds compared to many cable and DSL broadband services: up to 10Mb versus 8Mb, according to Current. The broadband service is symmetric, which means upload speeds are as fast as download speeds. Moreover, broadband-over-powerline works via a go-anywhere, installation-free modem that's about the size of a regular power adapter and plugs into any electrical outlet. It is Ethernet and WiFi enabled, which means it can fill in wireless coverage gaps created by cable or DSL, said Current VP of corporate development and strategy Brendan Herron. [More]

• No satellite dishes
• VoIP (Internet phone service)
• No TV dish
• No meter reader
• More reliable electric service.

Labels: Internet, rural life, technology

Net income climbed to $537.2 million, or $2.37 a share, from $436 million, or $1.85, a year earlier, topping analysts' estimates. Sales grew 5.9 percent to $6.63 billion, the Moline, Illinois-based company said today in a statement.

Overseas machinery revenue increased by 30 percent, and the company said U.S. and Canadian retail sales of agricultural equipment gained momentum. That growth countered lagging demand in the construction and forestry division, which has been hurt by the slump in the U.S. housing industry.

``Higher North and South American agricultural equipment demand expectations, driven by a resurgence in farmer cash flow'' boosted sales, Andrew Casey, an analyst with Wachovia Capital Markets LLC in Boston, wrote in an Aug. 7 note. He rates the stock ``outperform'' and raised his third-quarter profit estimate to $2.05 a share. [More]

The agricultural sector, which depends heavily on migrant labor, may be the hardest hit. "It's going to be crazy," says Eli Kantor, a Beverly Hills-based immigration attorney: "There will be major disruptions to the economy of Southern California, [which is] heavily dependent on immigrant labor. There will be crops rotting in the fields." Kantor says he expects some of his clients to lay staff off, while he expects others will "take their chances." [More]

Labels: economics, food, immigration

Labels: fun

Tunnell joined thousands of people in the U.S. who already knew a secret about the insurance industry: When there's a disaster, the companies homeowners count on to protect them from financial ruin routinely pay less than what policies promise.

Insurers often pay 30-60 percent of the cost of rebuilding a damaged home -- even when carriers assure homeowners they're fully covered, thousands of complaints with state insurance departments and civil court cases show.

Paying out less to victims of catastrophes has helped produce record profits. In the past 12 years, insurance company net income has soared -- even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. [More of a long but unsettling article]

Labels: insurance

On the question of grain- versus grass-fed cows, some suggest that pasture-fed cows may produce milk that contains more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a special type of fat that may protect against cancer and other health problems. But Michael Pariza, professor of food microbiology and toxicology at the University of Wisconsin, and a leading expert on CLA in dairy products, says grass feeding by itself does not assure increased CLA. He and Bauman both note that cows fed mixed grains with soybeans or other additions can produce milk that has higher CLA levels than milk from grass-fed cows. This may lead you to spend less on milk and more on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and other healthful foods. [More]

The eggs, from chickens raised in large, open barns instead of stacks of small wire cages, have become the latest addition to menus at universities, hotel chains like Omni and cafeterias at companies like Google. The Whole Foods supermarket chain sells nothing else, and even Burger King is getting in on the trend.

All that demand has meant a rush on cage-free eggs and headaches in corporate kitchens as big buyers learn there may not be enough to go around. [More]

We have seen new business models emerge over the last decade for dozens of industries including travel, advertising, and publishing—all relying heavily on technology-based improvements in productivity and changes in distribution associated with the Internet.

Now we may be seeing the emergence of a new business model for small farms, which have lagged the transformation of other industries and continued to rely heavily on commodity pricing and middlemen distributors.

At the forefront of this revolution is the 10-employee, $700,000-a-year Polyface Farm, a 550-acre producer of beef, chickens, and pork in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. A family farm run by its second generation owner, Joel Salatin, Polyface is thriving thanks to a combination of innovative use of technology to encourage livestock mobility, and streamlined distribution to bypass middlemen and instead sell products directly to consumers. [More]

Labels: food, organic, policy

Labels: fun, science

"Agrium's record second-quarter earnings were due to excellent results from all three of our strategic business units," said Wilson. "Results from our retail operations reflect the synergies we captured from our 2006 Royster-Clark acquisition, as well as the strong agricultural fundamentals."

The company said wholesale operations had its best-ever quarter, with record or near record margins across all product lines. Advanced technologies results doubled on the strength of sales of "environmentally smart nitrogen," combined with recent growth initiatives. [More]

I mean, how dumb do they think we are?

(Don't actually want to know the answer to that one)

Input prices will skyrocket up until a) competitive pressure forces companies to shrink margins to compete for market share (watch the Monsanto/Syngenta/Pioneer strategies in 2008 and beyond) or b) corn becomes less profitable than soybeans/wheat/cotton/retirement.

Labels: economics, production

Labels: fun

Citing anonymous sources, the New York Post has reported that rival Manhattan paper The New York Times is planning to do away with TimesSelect, the subscription-only content on its NYTimes.com Web site. According to the article by Holly M. Sanders, the main obstacle at the moment is reconfiguring the site's software. [More]

The internet news audience – roughly a quarter of all Americans – tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance. As many as 38% of those who rely mostly on the internet for news say they have an unfavorable opinion of cable news networks such as CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, compared with 25% of the public overall, and just 17% of television news viewers. [More]

One view is the following: the main reason we aren’t currently being decimated by terrorists is that the government’s anti-terror efforts have been successful.

The alternative interpretation is that the terror risk just isn’t that high and we are greatly overspending on fighting it, or at least appearing to fight it. For most government officials, there is much more pressure to look like you are trying to stop terrorism than there is to actually stop it. The head of the TSA can’t be blamed if a plane gets shot down by a shoulder-launched missile, but he is in serious trouble if a tube of explosive toothpaste takes down a plane. Consequently, we put much more effort into the toothpaste even though it is probably a much less important threat.

Likewise, an individual at the CIA isn’t in trouble if a terrorist attack happens; he or she is only in trouble if there is no written report that details the possibility of such an attack, which someone else should have followed up on, but never did because there are so many such reports written.

My guess is that the second scenario — the terrorism threat just isn’t that great — is the more likely one. Which, if you think about it, is the optimistic view of the world. But that probably still makes me a moron, a traitor, or both.

Labels: media, policy

About 15 minutes later, as curious passersby snapped pictures with their camera phones, the driver and passenger of the vehicle returned before tow trucks could arrive. "The situation was resolved without the use of ketchup, which in Chicago is a big thing," Smith said. The entourage got a grilling from the officer. "You can't just park here," the officer said. One of the passengers, who declined to be identified, said they were visiting a Wienermobile alumnus who worked nearby, but were unaware that one could not park a giant sausage in the middle of the city's busiest thoroughfare. Sydney Lindner, a spokeswoman for Kraft Foods, said the Wienermobile is on a nationwide tour promoting a contest to sing the Oscar Mayer jingle in an upcoming commercial. She said "regardless of the reason" the driver had for parking there, the company neither condones nor relishes such actions. [More - parental discretion advised]

Labels: fun, media

This afternoon I spoke with Illinois Natural History Survey Scientist and Aphid Expert, David Voetglin. He told me that there has been a very sharp increase in the abundance of aphids in suction traps placed in east-central Illinois (populations have been high in N. Illinois for some time and the populations have been moving south). He also reported that he was in an Iroquois County field on Monday that had over threshold (threshold is 250 per plant with 80% or more of plants infested) numbers of soybean aphid on every plant. He mentioned the oft-stated wisdom that the hot weather is supposed to slow the aphid reproduction down does not appear to be holding now, it has been hot and the suction trap numbers keep going up so he doesn't know what to expect.

Labels: production

Labels: fun

It also published a series called Prairie Farmer's Reliable Directory of Farmers and Breeders including this one for Champaign County from 1917. We'll be digitizing many of these directories for counties all over Illinois from the collection of the Illinois Historical Survey and Lincoln Room. These are great genealogy resources as they provide a complete listing of all members of a farmer's family and the exact location of their farm. [More]

Labels: history, Internet

Critics of the proposal -- ranging from farmers to restaurant owners to immigrant advocates -- predict the tougher approach will lead to massive layoffs of both legal and illegal workers, potentially crippling some industries that rely heavily on that low-paid workforce.

Supporters say it will cut into rampant illegal hiring that has been highlighted in recent workplace raids across the country, another step in a federal strategy to show a tougher face to the nation's estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants.

"The rule will be very specific and very hard on employers who choose not to comply," said Laura Keehner, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security who declined to say when the new regulations would go into effect. "If they choose not to follow the law, there will be consequences." [More]

Senator John McCain, trying to keep his presidential hopes aloft by jettisoning his courage and good sense, has leapt to the enforcement barricades, joining Senators Jon Kyl and Lindsey Graham in sponsoring a bill that is essentially a Minuteman’s to-do list of fence-building and punishments. He has shamefully repudiated his commitment to giving illegal immigrants a way to get right with the country. Senator Arlen Specter, meanwhile, wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post titled “A Less Ambitious Approach to Immigration,” in which he endorsed the creation of a permanent noncitizen immigrant underclass, saying it is the best we can hope for until “a more hospitable America” emerges. [More]

Labels: immigration

Labels: fun

The Black Death continues to cast a shadow across England. Although the modern English population is more cosmopolitan than ever, the plagues known as the Black Death killed so many people in the Middle Ages that, to this day, genetic diversity is lower in England than it was in the 11th century, according to a new analysis. Rus Hoelzel at the University of Durham, UK and his colleagues looked at the mitochondrial DNA from human remains at 4th and 11th century archaeological sites in England, and compared them to samples from the modern population stored on DNA databases such as GenBank. They found there was more variation in the ancient mitochondrial DNA sequences than in modern sequences. [More]

Labels: history, science

“The trend all over Europe shows returning confidence. Whilst this is also true in the UK, the recovery is not as marked as in Poland and France or as in Germany which comes out on top. From a low point in late 2005 and early 2006, German and Polish farmers have become much more confident. German farmers expect significantly higher prices for key products. Polish farmers have the confidence which springs from relatively recent entry into the EU”, says Dr. Jochen Köckler, Managing Director of the DLG Exhibitions Department.

A staggering 88 % of German farmers view the economic future for the industry from “very good” to “normal” compared with 81% in Poland, 58% in France and 54% in the UK. When farmers were asked how they see the state of their own business at present, just 16% of UK farmers judged current performance to be “good” or “very good”. This compares with 27% in France, 37% in Poland and 38% in Germany. [More]

• The EU in general is optimistic.

The outlook for economic growth in Europe is running at
its highest level for years, according to a Commission
survey, which shows a strong improvement in economic
confidence in the biggest EU economies, particularly
in Britain, followed by France and Germany.

Better-than-expected consumer confidence is the main
driving force behind the improved outlook, reports the
Economic Sentiment Indicator, which also shows
improvements in services confidence in the EU and
retail trade confidence in the eurozone.

This optimism comes at a time of firm oil prices and a
strong euro, with every prospect of higher interest rates.
Analysts now believe that there is increasing hope that
Europe will be able to sustain its recent economic revival.

• The Australian drought has decreased competition for lamb, wheat and dairy.
• The massive effort to reunify Germany is beginning to pay off.
• The Brits are unhappy - which tends to make Germans smile just a little.
• Germans can also smugly say "I told you so" to the US about Iraq.

Labels: international

In the case of farm programs, it is easy to demonstrate that feed grain and oilseed prices are largely unaffected by U.S. farm subsidies, particularly since 1996 when Congress removed USDA's authority to increase commodity prices through acreage set-asides and subsidized storage. It is also easy to demonstrate that the small share of the final consumer food dollar that goes to the farmer means that even a doubling of feed grain and oilseed prices from expanded biofuels production will lead to relatively modest increases in the prices of meat and dairy products. Food prices are largely determined by costs and profits after commodities leave the farm. [More]

Labels: ethanol, food, policy

The highest-selling tract, totaling 165.44 acres, sold for $9,500 an acre and the lowest-selling tract, 62.31 acres, brought $4,950 an acre. That 62.31-acre-tract was only 70% tillable, says Dave Klein, vice president and managing broker, Soy Capital Ag Services, Bloomington, 309-665-0961, whose firm handled the sale. [More]

For the first time, dairy farmers could threaten to sell their products elsewhere since the global dairy market is suddenly thirsty for German milk. And there's particular interest in powered whey. Prices for the yellowy stuff, which is the foundation for many packaged food products, have more than doubled within a year. Globalization has finally reached a sector that for a long time was organized regionally. While the dairy sector in Germany is still connected with the image of the quaint Bavarian farmer and his bell-wearing cows, in reality it's become an industry of multinational corporations, stock prices and commodities markets.

Milk is in demand. The inventories of food producers have dried up. So too has Europe's proverbial sea of surplus milk. The much-maligned mountain of extra butter is also gone. Such positive developments have even encouraged the European Commission to consider reforming Europe's bloated agricultural policies further.

EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel wants to increase the bloc's milk quotas, which have been frozen in place for years. The intention is to push along the decision made by EU agriculture ministers to do away with the convoluted quota system that regulates Europe's milk production. But the quotas will only be completely eliminated in 2015. While that might not seem very ambitious, at least the basic laws of supply and demand have been reestablished for the first time since the regulations for the milk market were implemented in 1968. [More]

Dean sells organic milk and soy products through its WhiteWave Foods division. The organic milk is specifically sold under its Horizon brand, a segment battling the industry-wide oversupply of raw organic milk.

Organic milk costs more than regular, making retail competition aggressive as companies use lower pricing, marketing and expanded distribution to try to sell off excess supply. [More]

Labels: dairy, ethanol, farmland, food

Labels: fun, safety

Labels: fun

Labels: blog

Wall Street's wild ride resumed Monday with the Dow industrials soaring 286 points, marking its biggest point gain in nearly 5 years, helped by financial sector strength and subsiding credit market fears.

The Dow Jones industrial average (up 286.87 to 13,468.78, Charts) soared 286 points, or 2.2 percent, staging its biggest point gain since October 2002, just a day before the Federal Reserve holds its policy meeting. [More]

And so, far from causing financial fires, hedge funds often act as firefighters. They plunge into infernos because they understand financial risks better than others and are less likely to get burned by them.

Armed with abundant capital, much of it from foreigners, they make it less likely that markets will plunge irrationally low. They have not repealed all bubbles for all time, but in some ways they can stabilize the system.

Before the crises of the 1990s, many economists believed that financial globalization was a good thing. After the crises, the consensus turned; economists reported little to no correlation between openness to global capital and economic growth -- not least because their data now included open countries that had experienced growth-destroying crises.

But, depending on how the next few weeks turn out, the consensus may swing back again. Maybe historians will determine that, in the first phase of financial globalization, governments and financiers didn't know how to manage the attendant risks. Maybe they will record that, finally, in this decade, they grew better at it. [More]

Labels: economics, money

1. The foot-and-mouth outbreak in the UK.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed to work "night and day" to avoid a repeat of a 2001 outbreak, when millions of dead animals were burned on pyres, swathes of the countryside were closed, rural tourism was badly hurt, and British meat was shut out of international markets.

"Our first priority has been to act quickly and decisively," Brown said. "I can assure people . . . we are doing everything in our power to look at the scientific evidence and to get to the bottom of what has happened and then to eradicate this disease." [More]

Last night, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said that the strain of foot and mouth disease found on a farm in southern England was identical to one used at a nearby laboratory. This raised the prospect of the outbreak being caused by a leak from one of the facilities most concerned with trying to defeat the disease. The only two laboratories licensed in this country to work with live foot and mouth disease virus are at Pirbright, Surrey, within three miles of the infected farm. And, The Independent on Sunday understands, there have been no movements of cattle at the infected farm since June. [More]

Labels: livestock, policy

Labels: fun, music

Treatment of mice with a 'friendly' bacteria, normally found in the soil, altered their behavior in a way similar to that produced by antidepressant drugs, reports research published in the latest issue of Neuroscience.

These findings, identified by researchers at the University of Bristol and colleagues at University College London, aid the understanding of why an imbalance in the immune system leaves some individuals vulnerable to mood disorders like depression.

Dr Chris Lowry, lead author on the paper from Bristol University, said: "These studies help us understand how the body communicates with the brain and why a healthy immune system is important for maintaining mental health. They also leave us wondering if we shouldn't all be spending more time playing in the dirt." [More]

Labels: policy, psychology

Labels: fun

The more serious threat to the handiwork of Pelosi and farm state lawmakers lies elsewhere.

For example, some on Chairman John Dingell’s Energy and Commerce Committee felt blindsided by air quality provisions in the final bill. Staffers pored through unfamiliar tomes on agricultural law after they learned late in the game that the measure contained a new provision allowing California farmers to use funds in the Environmental Quality Incentive Program to meet state and local clean air rules. EQIP has been mainly a clean water program. Air quality is firmly under the jurisdiction of Dingell, who didn’t earn his nickname “Big John” by demurring to turf raids by other committees.

The big losers in closed-door deal making that went on in Pelosi’s office until the wee hours last Thursday morning were the oil and gas industry and the crop insurance industry. Their lobbyists were caught short, but there is plenty of time for them to regroup as the bill goes to the Senate and then to a final House-Senate conference. [More]

Labels: farm bill

• Think rebilding old tractors is weird? How 'bout old submarines?

The vessel is an 8-foot replica of the 1776 submersible known as the Turtle, said Petty Officer Seth Johnson of the U.S. Coast Guard. It was unclear what the people were doing, but there was no indication of any connection to terrorism, he said.

The vessel "is the creative craft of three adventuresome individuals," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement, according to WABC-TV. "We can best summarize today's incident as marine mischief." [More]

• Russia claims the Arctic by planting a flag 13,000 feet below Santa Claus' workshop.

The first mini-sub dived to a spot 2.65 miles below the surface and the second sub to a nearby location 2.67 miles below the surface, Russia's NTV television reported. The subs spent about nine hours underwater.

Before beginning the descent, Chilingarov, who is also a deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament, declared that "every dive is a heroic deed — a heroic deed of those who dive for the sake of science and for Russia's presence in this region."

The expedition was part of an effort to bolster Russian claims to about 460,000 square miles of sea floor believed to hold lucrative deposits of oil and natural gas. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Russia's claim depends not on dropping the Russian flag, but on proving that its continental shelf extends to the pole. [More]

• All those video games could pay off. Our new Virginia Class subs are controlled by a pilot with a joystick, instead of traditional airplane-like controls.

The submarine is fitted with modular isolated deck structures, for example the submarine's command centre will be installed as one single unit resting on cushioned mounting points. The submarine's control suite is equipped with computer touch screens. The submarine's steering and diving control is via a four-button, two-axis joystick. [More]

Labels: military

The story demonstrates some of the weaknesses in Blinder's contention that an employment apocalypse approaches. On the one hand, pure price competition can't continue for long; rising demand for services in the primary destinations for offshoring companies has lead to rapid wage convergence. This has combined with dollar depreciation to erode the cost advantages available to firms moving jobs overseas. On the other hand, growth in the size and sophistication of back-office nations like India has begun to create economic opportunities for American companies and workers. America can't, after all, have a comparative disadvantage in everything.

But the American workers who benefit from growth in India and Eastern Europe may not be the exact workers who lose jobs to back office enterprises abroad, and as long as transition costs for some exist, there will be political traction available to those willing to sell the notion of an offshoring menace. So much the better, then, if new data on the scope and scale of the offshoring phenomenon provides a little perspective on what exactly might be lost, or gained. [More]

Labels: economics, international, trade

India can accept the recent WTO draft on agriculture as a basis for further talks in the Doha Round, but proposals on industrial goods were "fundamentally flawed and essentially biased", a senior government official said Thursday.
...
The WTO mediators also proposed that US farm subsidies be capped at $16.4 billion, compared to the $17 billion Washington has offered. The EU would have to cut its farm import tariffs by about 64 per cent. [More]

Labels: international, trade

Scientists have found a new way to identify a particularly deadly form of prostate cancer in a breakthrough that could save tens of thousands of men from undergoing unnecessary surgery each year.

In contrast to many cancers, only certain prostate tumors require treatment. Many are slow-growing and pose little threat to health. But separating the "tigers" from the "pussycats" -- as oncologists dub them -- is tricky.

Now that is set to change with new research showing how a genetic variation within tumour cells can signal if a patient has a potentially fatal form of the disease. [More]

Labels: health

Labels: blog

The administration unleashed its admonition as Paulson visited China once again, pursuing his favored course -- high-level talks with Chinese counterparts on a range of trade issues. Paulson has maintained that this Strategic Economic Dialogue remains the best channel for persuading China to allow its currency to float freely and to respect the norms of international trade.

Since the dialogue was launched in December to fanfare in Beijing, however, the main achievements have been minor deals, such as additional airline routes and promises of more talk. Growing numbers of lawmakers from both parties have joined a chorus of aggrieved manufacturers and labor unions, who maintain that China artificially depresses the value of the yuan to keep its goods unfairly cheap on world markets, costing American jobs. [More]

Labels: economics, international, trade

"I do want to move in that direction," said Harkin, an Iowa Democrat. He said the more he studied the revenue protection concept, the more value it held as a modification to the so-called counter-cyclical payments made when crop returns are below the targets set by Congress. [More]

Labels: farm bill