Labels: fun

Labels: blog, fun

Labels: blog

• I could be dead by then.
  
• Given the fact I struggled to follow the examples published recently, I anticipate a major, major education problem for FSA offices. Good thing they won't be closing many soon, huh?
  
• As some have noted, the idea of an option is a guarantee for serious laments after the choice is made. Wanna bet there is a heads-you,win-tails-you-win amendment in 2011?
• The act should be called the Farm Economist, Extension Meeting, Farm Media, and Crop Insurance Full Employment Act. [Arguably, that beats "The Heartland, Habitat, Harvest and Horticulture Act of 2007"] Try to imagine how many magazine pages of explanations, downloadable spreadsheets, websites, extension meetings, PowerPoint paralysis, letters to editors, advisory services, and outright scams that will latch onto this complex scheme by 2010. You will be so sick of reading about ACR, you'll skip over those articles for the ads.
• We can't predict ag conditions next summer, so who knows what will be going on in 2009 as we first make this choice? The possibility for legislator's regret could be significant.
  
• Regardless, by 2009 this optional program will be sooo gamed out by everyone - not just early reactors such as what happened with the "Dakota shuffle". Ah - those were the days...

Labels: farm bill, farm program

• Here Comes the Light by Joseph Graham ( 10029872) *
  
• Fear Not Good News by Robert Sterling ( 10033742)
• And the Stars Sang by Joseph Martin ( 10029840) *

Labels: Christmas, music

People turned to farming to grow fiber for clothing, and not to provide food, says one researcher who challenges conventional ideas about the origins of agriculture.

Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University, says his theory also explains why Aboriginal Australians were not generally farmers.

Gilligan says they did not need fiber for clothing, so had no reason to grow crops like cotton. [More]

Labels: history

Labels: fun, photo

A critical determinant of China's long-term economic growth and social stability will be whether the wealth of its economic boom can reach the majority of its 700 million farmers, who make up approximately 56 percent of the total population. The benefits that the rural population has received from the economic reforms of the past two and a half decades, while significant, were largely achieved in the 1980s, and now the countryside lags badly behind the urban sector. A survey we conducted in 17 provinces, among 1,962 farmers and other respondents, confirms one fundamental cause of the widening rural-urban income gap: most Chinese farmers still lack secure and marketable land rights that would allow them to make long-term investments in land, decisively improve productivity, and accumulate wealth.

Farmers in China face multiple threats to their land rights from local government and village officials. The most prominent threat is land expropriation or acquisition through eminent domain to satisfy demands of industrial growth or urban expansion. Despite a series of central laws and policies, in practice, farmers who lose their land typically receive little or no compensation. Closely related as another source of insecurity of land rights is the persistent "readjustment" or "reallocation" of farmers' landholdings that is administratively conducted by village officials. Today, such land-related problems are the number one cause for rural grievances and unrest in China, which reported 17,900 cases of "massive rural incidents" of farmers' protests in the first nine months of 2006.

China adopted a Property Law in March 2007 that aims to strengthen the security of farmers' land rights, and the next key step will be full implementation of the law. We calculate that securing rural land rights would bring more than half a trillion dollars of value to farmers. Implementing the property law requires major institutional and legal measures on several fronts that China must tackle in the immediate future. [More]

Labels: land, law

Labels: blog

How will the apparent inclusion of an ever-ready ag disaster program impact a producer's attitude toward buying up crop insurance?

What if.. If as I suspect that the CBO assumes in their analysis that x-percent of producers would buy up insurance to a higher level, the savings resulting from that assumption may not be realized near to the degree that CBO might have predicted. [More by subscription - seriously, ya need to find room for this in your budget]

Labels: farm bill, production

Labels: fun, Internet

Labels: ethanol, production

It's been a brave new world for genetic crops for some time now but Chicago-based researchers say they have developed a method to take crop manipulation to a higher level: the chromosome.

Creating an artificial chromosome, into which several manipulated genes can be inserted, may speed efforts to produce fuels and medicines from plants as well as boosting crop nutrition and yield.

In a scientific paper set for publication Friday researchers from Chicago-based Chromatin Inc. and the Universities of Chicago and North Carolina reported success in creating an artificial chromosome for corn plants. Through four generations, the corn treated the man-made chromosomes as if they were natural and passed them along to offspring intact at a rate nearly as high as for chromosomes native to the plants.

"This appears to be the tool that agricultural scientists and farmers have long dreamed of," said Daphne Preuss, a University of Chicago professor of molecular genetics and Chromatin's president. [More]

Labels: biotech, production, technology

Lake Lanier, the water source that serves a third of Georgia's residents, only has a 4 month's supply of water. Forecasters predict the drought could last months, and residents should look for news ways to conserve.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin says, the city has cut water use by not watering parks. She says maintaining water supplies for drinking and fighting fires is the primary concern. Atlanta commissioner for the Department of Watershed Management, Rob Hunter says Lake Lanier has a 121 day supply of water. He says reducing consumption is key. He offered residents several suggestions: take shorter showers, repair leaky faucets and pipes, and cut outdoor water usage. [More]

Labels: physics, science, weather

But the broad strength of commodity prices may also reflect the appeal of the sector as an “alternative asset”, along with hedge funds and private equity. Ever since the dotcom bubble burst, investors have been keen to diversify away from their traditional focus on equities and government bonds. That has led to the launch of a whole series of exchange-traded funds based on commodities, which have made the asset class accessible for a much wider range of investors; the latest example, from Barclays Global Investors, is a fund based on timber prices. And Wall Street has been gearing up to meet demand; a survey by Options Group, a recruitment consultant, found that the hiring rate of commodity traders is up 33% on last year.

The recent credit crunch may have given commodities a further lift. Speculative money that had been flowing into high-yield bonds and structured credit is now looking for a new home. Some commodities, particularly gold, are also seen as a hedge against a declining dollar.

Robin Bhar, a metals strategist at UBS, says investors seem to feel they have an each-way bet on commodity prices. Either global economic growth is strong and supply remains tight, or the world slips into stagflation, as it did in the 1970s. In either case, commodities should perform well. [More]

Labels: land, wealth

And, when you make it on a stupid YouTube video entitled, "Drop that Pot Pie," you know you are in trouble.

Labels: food, media

1. Investing serious hours at the FSA and extension meetings learning the new program and getting the paperwork done.
   
2. Employment of more farm managers to act on behalf of landowners and select the optimum route.
3. Electing to reside total faith in the tenant via FSA power-of-attorney.
4. Just take a large rent check on 1 March and lose the whole headache.
   

Labels: farm bill, land, production

When it comes to growing and harvesting switchgrass as an energy crop, recent studies have shown that farmers likely could grow switchgrass for $30 to $35 a ton in the Midwest. However, many cellulosic-ethanol technology companies have not been able to bring down their production costs far enough to allow them to pay farmers enough to grow such a crop at a profit.

Petiot said cellulosic plants will require at least 7,000 tons of feedstock per day and will need to be able to produce their own enzymes near the plants to make it economical.

Corey Radtke, a scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, said that when it comes to storing biomass materials such as switchgrass or corn stover, the U.S. faces a unique situation.

For example, he said while the moderate-to-moist climate in the eastern half of the country is virtually ideal for growing biomass crops, it is not a good area to store crops like switchgrass. That's because such cellulosic-ethanol feedstocks can be ruined if they become wet during storage.

In the much drier and warmer western half of the country, Radtke said, farmers struggle to grow biomass crops, but the climate is perfect for storing biomass. [More]

Labels: ethanol

Labels: fun

Labels: fun

The breakthrough apparently came when the Congressional Budget Office assigned a $3 billion savings to a proposal to offer farm program participants an option, beginning in 2010, to choose between traditional farm programs or a state-level revenue assurance program, an insurance program that provides income coverage when either yields or prices fall. Under his proposal, participants in farm programs would be allowed to plant non-program crops. Coupled with savings provided earlier this month by the Senate Finance Committee, Harkin said his "chairman's mark" next week will offer $4 billion in new funding for conservation programs. Of that, $1.28 billion is earmarked for the Conservation Security Program – which Harkin plans to rename the "Conservation Stewardship Program." Even though the House bill has no funding for the program, Harkin noted his bill is fully funded and theirs is not. "They will have to come our way" in the Senate-House conference, he predicted. Harkin projects the CSP, which provides "green payments" for conservation practices on working lands, will grow by 13 million acres through the life of the five-year bill. [More] [my emphasis]

Harkin confirmed the proposal will include a yearly optional "average crop revenue program" (ACR) beginning in 2010 that would, according to sources:

-- be optional for a producer who could choose either the new revenue-trigger counter-cyclical program or the existing program, beginning in 2010 (the option would be on an annual basis);
-- provide a $15 per acre payment to all program crops choosing the revenue option;
-- eliminate current direct payments;
-- eliminate marketing loans, and thus, loans would become recourse loans;
-- base a revenue-payment on a state revenue concept;
-- base payments on the lower of current acreage planted or the average of plantings from 2002-200);
-- allow revenue program participants to no longer be bound by rules that now bar the planting of fruits and vegetables from land eligible for crop subsidies;
-- not require a producer to purchase crop insurance in order to qualify for ACR.
[More via subscription]

Labels: farm bill

Labels: farm bill, media, politics

Labels: farm bill, policy

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So, now the strong prices coming from Chicago and the signals being flashed from the rest of the world will just have to wait. Acreages is expected to increase over last year by about 6 % to 7 %, but that will just get acreage back at 2005-06 levels. If the export market remains strong throughout the rest of this year, and expectations hold out that U.S. soybean acreage stays historically low in 2008 (even in light of the projections that acres will rebound next year, acreage will be lower than normal) the Brazilian market will be poised to make a dramatic comeback. It just won’t happen until the 2008-09 growing season. [More]

Labels: international, production

In spite of the uncertainty, Iowa land ownership and rental arrangements will be
changing in the near future. Almost half, 48 percent, of Iowa’s land is owned by people
over the age of 65 and almost a quarter, 24 percent, is owned by people over the age of 75.
This means there will be a significant amount of farmland changing hands over the next
few years. It remains to be seen whether or not this land comes on the open market for
sale. Regardless of how or to whom the land is transferred, there will be an impact on land
values. Iowa land values and the returns to Iowa farmland will remain as a topic of keen
interest for many years to come. [More]

[my emphasis]

Land transfers are the cutting edge in the structure of landownership and control. Even though the annual turnover in rural land is very slow -- currently 4.6 percent of parcels and 3.5 percent of land -- concerns linger that farmers in the United States are losing control of the resource that is basic to their industry. Small, persistent changes can eventually make a difference, but the data examined here indicate that a transfer of landownership out of agriculture is occurring at an almost imperceptibly slow pace. [More, but ya hafta order it]

• Will longevity trends (especially in previously short-lived males) change this normal rate? [40 points]
  
• Why should future land turnover be any different than the past? (Discuss in paragraph form) [30 points]
  
• Do you know of an flat black 80 I can get for under $5K? [200 bonus points]
  

Labels: economics, land, media

More recently, Lummaa and her colleagues have been studying how sons are not just tough on their mothers but also hard on their siblings. Those born after a son were physically slighter, had smaller families and generally had a greater chance of dying from an infectious disease. The effects held up whether the elder brother died in childhood or not, suggesting that the negative outcome is not a result of some direct sibling interaction, such as competition for food, regular beatings or the practice of primogeniture, in which the eldest brother inherits everything. “Big brothers are bad for you,” Lummaa explains. “If the fifth-born was a male, then the sixth-born is doing worse.” [More]

Labels: culture, family, fun

At a dinner I attended in Brussels last week with a small group of CAP reformers, former EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler shared his experiences of the politics of reform. One of the most interesting things he had to say concerned a study by the OECD showing that barely 25 per cent of traditional production-linked subsidies actually went to farmers. He said this study had been invaluable as he traveled around Europe trying to convince European farmers to embrace his proposals for decoupling farm payments. But a recent clutch of academic studies is confirming the anecdotal evidence that decoupled farm payments are just as leaky as old style production subsidies they replaced.

A new study of land prices and rents in Germany and the United States by by Harald von Witzke, Steffen Noleppa, and P. Lynn Kennedy shows that the problem of land value capitalization is still very much with us in the new era of decoupling. They find that of every euro in subsidy paid to German farmers, two-thirds is passed on to the landowners and conclude that:

The operator is the intended beneficiary of agricultural subsidies in the European Union; however, as we have found, the main beneficiary is the landowner. Therefore, agricultural subsidies must be considered instruments that are poorly targeted to the intended beneficiaries. In fact, the shocking reality is that land rents in the absence of EU farm subsidies would be negative in most of Germany.

This conclusion is consistent with other recent studies into the impact of decoupled farm payments on land values, such as this study by Arathi Bhaskar and John C. Beghin at Iowa State University and this study by Stefan Kilian and Klaus Salhofer at Technische Universität München.

The implications are of even greater concern given the high and rising share of farm land that is rented and not farmed by the owner. The current subsidy-driven rush to biofuels can only make things worse. [More]

Labels: economics, land, policy

Labels: culture, fun

ConAgra Foods on Wednesday asked stores to stop selling pot pies linked to a salmonella outbreak, although the company and the Department of Agriculture defended their decision not to immediately recall the product.

ConAgra asked stores nationwide to pull the Banquet and generic brand chicken and turkey pot pies after two East Coast grocery chains made their own choice to remove the product from their shelves.

The pot pies made by ConAgra have been linked to at least 139 cases of salmonella in 30 states. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at least 20 people have been hospitalized, but so far no deaths have been linked to the pot pies. [More]

The vast majority of reported cases of foodborne illness occur as individual or sporadic cases. The origin of most sporadic cases is undetermined. In the United States, where people eat outside the home frequently, most outbreaks (58%) originate from commercial food facilities (2004 FoodNet data). An outbreak is defined as occurring when two or more people experience similar illness after consuming food from a common source.

Often, a combination of events contributes to an outbreak, for example, food might be left at room temperature for many hours, allowing bacteria to multiply which is compounded by inadequate cooking which results in a failure to kill the dangerously elevated bacterial levels. [More]

Labels: food, health

In other words, the lion's share of inducements have gone to production—call it supply-side energy policy. But crudely stimulating this ethanol is actually the cause of the ethanol backlash. As production increases, the price of the commodity used in the process (corn) rises. So does the price of the expertise and materials needed to build capacity. During the railroad boom, the cost of steel and the salaries of engineers rose. During the dot-com boom, the cost of fiber-optic capacity and the salaries of Web programmers rose. The Wall Street Journal reported that the cost of building a new ethanol plant has risen from $1.50-per-gallon last year to $2.20 per gallon today.

The combination of rising commodity prices and production costs and a glut of product makes it more difficult for the manufacturers to turn a profit. In the second quarter, Verasun's gross margins shrunk to 19.2 percent, compared with 41 percent in the same quarter the year before. In its second quarter, Aventine gross margins shrunk from 11 percent to 6.9 percent. Verasun said earlier this week it would suspend construction of a refinery in Indiana. [More]

Labels: ethanol, policy

Labels: fun

Over the past few decades, the Republican Party has championed a series of reforms designed to devolve power to the individual, through tax cuts, private pensions and medical accounts. The temperamental conservative does not see a nation composed of individuals who should be given maximum liberty to make choices. Instead, the individual is a part of a social organism and thrives only within the attachments to family, community and nation that precede choice.

Therefore, the temperamental conservative values social cohesion alongside individual freedom and worries that too much individualism, too much segmentation, too much tension between races and groups will tear the underlying unity on which all else depends. Without unity, the police are regarded as alien powers, the country will fracture under the strain of war and the economy will be undermined by lack of social trust.

To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots. This may seem like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.

American conservatism will never be just dispositional conservatism. America is a creedal nation. But American conservatism is only successful when it’s in tension — when the ambition of its creeds is restrained by the caution of its Burkean roots. [More of an excellent op-ed]

Labels: culture, politics

Can organic food feed the world? A recent study, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems provides new data that suggests it can. However, I have some grave reservations about this prospect that are based on my experience as a scientist and my time living and working with real farmers in developing nations.

The authors of this study assume the major stumbling blocks to organic farming feeding the world are low crop yields and insufficient quantities of approved organic fertilisers. However, I have lived and worked in Bangladesh – as a professor of Cornell University, covering agricultural research and development – for the last 25 years, and I believe that even if these problems could be surmounted, using organic farming to feed the developing world remains a pipe dream. [More]

Labels: culture, economics, organic

Visitors to the Farm Progress Show in Decatur, Ill,, last month who toured Monsanto's exhibit received an inkling of why Monsanto has a healthy number of mechanical engineers on staff. The company displayed state-of-the art machines used to screen for genes without damaging the seed.

Farm Progress editors touring Monsanto's labs last week got a firsthand look at those machines in action. One of them, a seed chipper, removes a minute piece, more or less dust, from a soybean without damaging the viability of the seed. Breeders could still plant the seed and grow it normally.

As a matter of fact, that's exactly what happens. The tiny pieces of soybean from hundreds of thousands of soybeans run through the machine are 'fingerprinted' for DNA in another process. If the breeder is looking for soybeans with a certain gene, he can discover which ones have it, and note what other traits that bean possesses. The bottom line is he can select promising single seeds to grow without having to grow them all out. Once he determines what he wants, he simply tells the employees in the lab, and they retrieve the exact seed that the sample came from. Then he can grow it out and move on with the breeding process from there.

The seed chipper machine was designed and invented 'in-house,' Monsanto officials say. It's just one of several machines invented there to help in their search for genes that could impart benefit to agronomic crops, particularly corn, soybeans, cotton and canola- the target crops for Monsanto's research. [More]

Labels: education, technology

Yet another so-called "study" about the impact of corn-based ethanol on the nation's food supply has been issued. Like the others, its authors choose facts that support their opinion, and disregard everything else. Once again we're told ethanol has little impact on the nation's dependence on foreign oil and is driving up food prices. "Impact," we guess, is a relative term. Ethanol is replacing 200 million barrels of imported oil per year. With the price of oil above $80/barrel, ethanol's impact on oil imports alone is more than $16 billion dollars. [More]

Labels: energy, ethanol

Soaring food prices, driven in part by demand for ethanol made from corn, have helped slash the amount of food aid the government buys to its lowest level in a decade, possibly resulting in more hungry people around the world this year.

The United States, the world’s dominant donor, has purchased less than half the amount of food aid this year that it did in 2000, according to new data from the Department of Agriculture.

“The people who are starving and have to rely on food aid, they will suffer,” Jean Ziegler, who reports to the United Nations on hunger and food issues, said in an interview this week. [More]

But companies and farm cooperatives have built so many distilleries so quickly that the ethanol market is suddenly plagued by a glut, in part because the means to distribute it have not kept pace. The average national ethanol price on the spot market has plunged 30 percent since May, with the decline escalating sharply in the last few weeks.

“The end of the ethanol boom is possibly in sight and may already be here,” said Neil E. Harl, an economics professor emeritus at Iowa State University who lectures on ethanol and is a consultant for producers. “This is a dangerous time for people who are making investments.”

While generous government support is expected to keep the output of ethanol fuel growing, the poorly planned overexpansion of the industry raises questions about its ability to fulfill the hopes of President Bush and other policy makers to serve as a serious antidote to the nation’s heavy reliance on foreign oil. [More]

Labels: ethanol, food, media, policy

Labels: history