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

The United States makes more manufactured goods today than at any time in history, as measured by the dollar value of production adjusted for inflation -- three times as much as in the mid-1950s, the supposed heyday of American industry. Between 1977 and 2005, the value of American manufacturing swelled from $1.3 trillion to an all-time record $4.5 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the United States is responsible for almost one-fourth of global manufacturing, a share that has changed little in decades. The United States is the largest manufacturing economy by far. Japan, the only serious rival for that title, has been losing ground. China has been growing but represents only about one-tenth of world manufacturing. [More]

Labels: culture, economy, education

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

So instead of lamenting the increased earnings gap caused by education, policymakers and the pub­lic should focus attention on how to raise the fraction of American youth who complete high school and then go on for a college education. Solutions are not cheap or easy. But it will be a disaster if the focus remains so much on the earnings inequality itself that Congress tries to interfere directly with this inequality rather than trying to raise the education levels of those who are now being left behind. [More]

Labels: economics, education

I'm not sure that I care at all about the size of the gap between the rich and poor, provided that the poor have all the ingredients of a decent life. I don't think that they do, yet, in America or much of anyplace else, but I think the solutions to most of their problems lie elsewhere than in redistribution. Of course, I care about other inequalities that can be conferred by high socioeconomic status, such as extreme differences in power or autonomy, but I am very sure that those disparities cannot be rectified simply by taking money from the richer and giving it to the poorer. So it's hard to get worked up simply because CEO's have gotten a pay rise.

What I do care about, once basic needs are taken care of, is how easy it is to change one's position on the ladder. Or rather, since earning money is never exactly easy, whether place in the income distribution is conferred by who one's parents were, or by one's own efforts. The evidence in America is that where you start out has a lot to do with where you end up. This bothers me a great deal. But there's less evidence that the problem of income immobility is growing.

Even if it isn't, of course, I would prefer to live in a world where the children of Bill Gates, and an average welfare mother, have the same opportunity to succeed. While I doubt that this dream will ever be fully realised, I still think America could go much farther in that direction than it has, for starters by doing something about the appalling inequities in its educational system. Unfortunately, altering the socio-political structures that reinforce accident of birth is so difficult that almost everyone prefers to focus on the (comparatively) trivially easy task of moving cash from one person to another. [More]

I find this point very persuasive. Better access to education could mitigate many of the income and asset distribution problems, I believe. In fact, in an upcoming (probably April) issue of Top Producer, I will try to incorporate this factor into my idea of what a good safety net for farmers could look like.

Labels: economics, education