Letters from Africa...  

The following are dispatches from a man I am proud to call my friend, Wallie Hardie from North Dakota. Through a serendipitous chain of events starting with a daughter who is a nurse-missionary in Mozambique, he has somehow proceeded to start a farm there AND then buy 100,000 acres in Tanzania.

On top of it all is his admirable motivation of truly helping those most in need of help in a way only a great farmer could. The following are his recent letters.  I will add more and any pictures when they arrive.

The land...

The landscape of central Mozambique is stunning to a dirt farmer like me.  Gently rolling dark soils of mainly silt loam textures.    Out of nowhere these huge hills with steep granite facings pop up perhaps 20 acres in size with heights up to 300 ft.  Some are shaped like a football on a tee, others have very irregular shapes with the largest mass at the top, like a natural water tower.

The name of the farm here is Rei do Agro, king of agriculture.  Our intent is to convert these soils into highly productive producers of soybeans, wheat, barley, sunflower, and corn.  Our game plan is to clear existing trees, plant a single crop in December for two years, then install an irrigation system using SDI subsurface drip irrigation or center pivot on the third year.  The water will come from small reservoirs created by dams installed on seasonal streams that are abundant here.

Coming from the cold North Dakota tundra, the temps here are heavenly.  It is winter and the sun arcs across the northern sky from east to west.   It is 65 degrees at sunup with a high about 80.   Summer here (december) is 80 to 100, but that is also the rainy season...you can get a 11/2 inch rain and be farming the next day!  After analyzing temp and rainfall data it is becoming quite clear we should plan on a triple crop, no till system that starts with a 1.5 to 2.0 maturity soybean that is planted in December and comes off in April.  Immediately followed by barley and wheat no-tilled into the soybean stubble.   The barley would be harvested in late July, the straw would be baled and later maize varieties would be planted with liquid fertilizer based no till systems.  As the wheat comes off, earlier varieties would go in.  This system would prevent the tendency for these soils to bake in the tropical sun.

The demand for all of these crops here is huge.  Soybean processors, barley malt producers, bakery's, and chicken producers have been in constant contact hoping to get some of our production because they cannot source enough to meet growing nutritional needs here in Africa.

All for now.  Next time I will share about the people here.     

The people...

The only word that comes to mind when describing the status of the people of southeast Africa....heartbreaking.  Less than 15% have jobs as we know them.  A large majority of the children are malnourished.  Almost everyone receives a three year maximum education and is functionally illiterate.  As we drive through the countryside we pass through countless villages where masses of people walk along the roadway, the women carrying stuff on their heads, all with perfect posture.  The men usually aren't carrying anything--"where are they going" I ask my partners, "who knows" is the reply.   I am struck by the homogeneity of the culture--everyone equally poor.

How is it that these folks seem stuck in a twilight zone of 40 year lifespans and hardscrabble living in this modern world?  Some Africans will tell you part of their problem has to do with good intentioned people giving them stuff & taking away the motivation to EARN a living.  Even our "Farmers feeding the world" program launched a few months ago is a quarter turn off.  Farmers should be about mentoring their African counterparts to feed their own continent with the incredible resources they have right here.

There is a remote village about 5 miles west of our farm that needed a source of fresh water.  We had a well drilling company doing two holes for our needs and it was not hard to spend an extra 12K to help them get a great well, of course pumped by hand.  Now they need some kind of business activity to get them on the first rung of the economic ladder.  Our plan is called the hub--outgrower model that involves a large farm at the center that has its own production systems, but also provides the infrastructure for small local farmers to access the knowledge base, inputs, machinery, and most importantly the transparent market to thrive in their own right.  We have our own Extension specialist on staff to implement this process.

An example, we are planning to install a small-scale ethanol production facility as a first step in our sustainability model.  This plant provides the engine for all kinds of good things to happen.  The feedstock will probably be cassava, a root plant that is essentially all starch and can be easily grown by small farmers on poorer soils.  Hundreds of farmers will have a new market for this crop.  The energy source will probably be wood chips.  With the thousands of acres of trees needing to be removed to build out the farm, this is a ubiquitous energy resource that employs many people.  Getting diesel and gasoline into the farm is difficult and costly.   Making our own fuel is a no brainer.  But running an ethanol plant requires highly skilled operators.  Finding and training these people won't be easy, but is the pathway that some will gladly take to break out of a cycle of hopelessness.

All for now,  next time I will talk about opportunities and threats.  

 Godspeed and safe travel, Wallie.

The separation...  

Of Church and Plate. Agriculture has watched bemused as celebrities and the occasional real human embrace, umm...alternative diets.  But popular pastor Rick Warren takes it up a notch when he brings scripture to the menu.

This is a story about weight loss. Four young men are kidnapped by an invading army, forced against their will to their enemy’s teeming capital, into the heart of the palace of the enemy king. Their old names are taken away. Their clothing is stripped off, and they are dressed up in the stiff, stifling robes of the foreign court. They are kept under watch, instructed in a new language, forbidden the worship of their fathers’ god. They are offered riches and power in the king’s service, if only they give themselves over to the life of the court, sit at the king’s banquet table and eat his rich, strange food, answer to new names in a new language—if only they forget who they were. 

Did I say this is a story about weight loss? Excuse me: Pastor Rick Warren says this is a story about weight loss. The story is the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Daniel, and out of the wealth of details in this two-and-a-half-millennia-old book, Pastor Warren has plucked one in particular as the centerpiece of his church-sanctioned diet.
Daniel, one of the four kidnapped Jewish youths, “resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine,” and chose to subsist on vegetables instead, ending up as healthy as anyone in his captors’ court. So, as Time magazine recently reported, Warren has “launched the Daniel Plan, a comprehensive health-and-fitness program.” [More]

Actually, I have no problem with preaching against carbs, for example. But I think this is just one more example of ways fundamentalist orthodoxy can create conflicts with American ideals of freedom. Which is why we have wisely tried to keep as much daylight between government and religion as we have.

Bible-literalists in rural America may have to swallow hard to embrace this latest self-help interpretation from the same guy who launched a thousand study groups with "The Purpose-Driven Life".

• EAT Delicious Whole Foods
  Have 70% of your daily diet consist of whole, living foods including raw or lightly cooked vegetables, fruit, raw nuts and seeds. The other 30% can include lean protein, whole grains and starchy vegetables.
  Don’t drink your calories (sodas, juices, alcohol). Drink water instead.
  Read the label: Avoid high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, nitrates, food coloring.
  Avoid the “white menaces,” flour, rice, potatoes and sugar (bread, pasta, cookies, cakes).
  Supplement your diet with high quality vitamins Omega-3, Vit. D, and a multi-vitamin.
  Eat nutritious breakfast that includes protein. Add healthy snacks throughout the day. Low fat lunches. Light dinners (don’t eat within three hours of bedtime).

MOVE Your Way to Health
Stay active daily. Find ways to enjoy exercise. God made our bodies for movement.

• Begin improving your posture, flexibility and cardiovascular/aerobicconditioning.Lose weight faster with “burst” (interval) training. Read “How to Exercise” to guide you.
• Burn calories, gain strength using resistance training.

THINK Sharper and Smarter
Your decisions about the way you eat, move and think are results of your brain health.

• Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night. Stress less with deep breathing and exercise.
• Reverse risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s by learning something new: language, scripture.
• Avoid brain robbers like; alcohol, drugs, smoking, and sports that can cause concussions.
• Don’t believe the automatic negative thoughts in your head. Challenge and replace them with the truth! 

[More]

Aside from the admonitions against HFCS, rice, potatoes, etc., the warning about football will doubtless cause some controversy.  On the whole, the recommendations are in the mainstream of medical advice.

The problem for me is the same as the above writer: since when did Scripture devolve into a glorified self-help book? While it has always offered guidance for life, I don't find it to be the end authority on health any more than on science.

Strict "Biblical living" seems to have an attraction that reappears every so often in modern cultures. And time and again, the impracticality of its misuse reduces its power in areas where it can truly work miracles.

The Daniel diet is a good enough idea. Selling with a theological endorsement is inappropriate and unhelpful to both health and religion.

Junkbox, Episode LSMFT...  

If you know what the episode number means, you're old enough to read this post.

• Good background on the Keystone pipeline, which I believe will be approved with an al;tenate route shortly after the election.
•  Old words, new meanings
• The most important object in the global economy
• Economics isn't helping
• Google and plagiarism: Has everybody been copying?
• Are we headed for Ultimate Football?

Corn at 24% and ears dropping off the stalk. Wind damage from recent rains. 2012 may be all about soybeans for us.

It's not the left...  

You need to worry about if you want subsidies. Consider this tweet from Josh Barro, conservative economist with impeccable credentials:

@jbarro:Farmers talking about why they need subsidies sound almost exactly like teachers talking about why it should be impossible to fire them.

I never imagined the wind down of ag subsidies would be effectively abetted by farmers angry over obscure ideology. But that appears to be the way they will vote.

Whatever. You go guys.
 

MY CPI...  

I've always been skeptical of inflation numbers. Since they are calculated for the nation as a whole, how accurate can they be on the nano-economic level - me?

For example, if your home is paid for and you're not sending kids to college, why should those prices affect your spending power? Obviously, the government cannot provide individual inflation measures, but as we say these days, "There's an app for that."

Calculate your personal inflation rate here. Then use it to determine your real interest rates and opportunity costs. Beware - your number could be higher than the US average.

Mine? -0.14%.

It's not just feed costs...  

There's the cage issue and now this:

 A new study suggests eating egg yolks can accelerate heart disease almost as much as smoking.

The study published online in the journal Atherosclerosis found eating egg yolks regularly increases plaque buildup about two-thirds as much as smoking does. Specifically, patients who ate three or more yolks a week showed significantly more plaque than those who ate two or less yolks per week.
It may seem harsh to compare smoking with eating egg yolks, but lead study author Dr. David Spence says researchers needed a way to put it into perspective since both eating cholesterol and smoking increase cardiovascular risks - but the general public believes smoking is far worse for your health.

The issue is with the yolk, not the egg, says Spence, who is also a professor of neurology at the University of Western Ontario's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. "One jumbo chicken egg yolk has about 237 milligrams of cholesterol."[More]

Now throw into the mix news that long-range studies are sifting out some myths about cholesterol in general. For example, maybe there is no such thing as "good" cholesterol.

Cholesterol in the blood is carried by particles called lipoproteins, which come in different sizes and densities, according to the researchers. There is a well-established connection between elevated LDL levels and heart attack, and decades of research - including genetic studies similar to the new study - paved the way for the development of lipid-lowering drugs known as statins.
But research has been less clear on HDL, since a study more than 30 years ago found the higher levels of HDL a person had, the least likely they were to have a heart attack. Mouse studies since then have reported similar findings, but researchers haven't been able to prove the link conclusively. The new study may provide the clearest evidence yet of the role HDL plays, the researchers said.
"Through our research, we have found that all roads that raise HDL do not always lead to the promise land of reduced risk of heart attack," said study co-author Dr. Benjamin F. Voight, an assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a university written statement. [More]

Even more alarming (to Big Pharma) is the heretical idea that statins aren't the panacea.

Statins such as Lipitor and Crestor are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. Their effectiveness in lowering LDL cholesterol has been firmly established; however, the overall impact upon the health of those using statins is questionable. Serious side effects such as liver damage, cataracts, muscle pain and renal failure have been known for some time, but thought to be rare; however recent evaluation of statin use outcomes reveals that the risks may in fact outweigh the benefits. Is the practice of prescribing statins as a preventative measure for individuals with borderline LDL likely to cause more harm than good? Perhaps, exercise, good diet and plant sterol supplements should be the vigorously endorsed as the frontline treatment, prior to any consideration of statin therapy. [More]

The egg yolk study strikes me as a little narrow and solitary in the research literature, but it was large enough to be respected. After having outlived a mound of bad press a few years ago, this cannot be helpful to the egg industry. If egg producers are infighting over cages, they may miss this health broadside that could really lose them some market share.

By the way, Doctor...  

Does treating for mild hypertension do any good?

Hoffman, of UCLA, says that it is always possible to dismiss “inconveniently negative” evidence, like that in the Cochrane review, because no study can test every possible dosage or combination of medicines or duration of treatment. Thus it is always technically possible that some untested formula might work. But he calls the Cochrane review “the best evidence currently available” about the effects of drug treatment on patients with mild hypertension and says that its results fit with what is known about diminishing returns—and the potential for dangerous side effects—when treating people with less severe disease. He also objects to the idea of treating “unless and until we know for sure that it’s a bad idea,” suggesting instead that “we shouldn’t subject patients to possible harm unless and until we have reasonably good evidence that it’s worth doing.”

Given the possibility that future trials will identify at best a small, currently nonapparent benefit, it seems clear that the best thing for doctors to do would be simply to tell patients the truth—that while the best current evidence doesn’t support routine treatment of mild hypertension, we really don’t know for sure. But we do know this: Emphasizing far more effective—and evidence-based—approaches, such as exercising, quitting smoking, and following a Mediterranean diet, seems to be a very good idea. And besides, they work. [More]

Another conversation I will be having at my annual physical.

I'm just sayin'...  

Connect these two dots...

Consider the federal government. Of the 23 cabinet members, only the Secretary of Energy and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency have engineering or natural science backgrounds. Even they are exceptions. Of the 22 former heads of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency, only three had engineering training. The majority were lawyers.
In Congress, out of 535 members, six are engineers and one is a physicist. (All told, there are more accountants, musicians, and talk show hosts.) By contrast, eight of the nine members of the Chinese Politburo, the highest-ranking officials in China, have engineering degrees. [More]

Meanwhile, Chinese citizens give a 90% approval rating to their national government. Approval rating for the US government is around 17%. 

Mere coincidence.

I think not.

Junkbox, Episode VINO...  

What an odd pre-harvest sentiment has settled in around our community. All the anticipation of a dentist appointment.

• Who answers political polling calls? (Not many, anymore)
• Our biggest energy natural advantage could be...water.
• I've called it a tax on the stupid. Why not make it a tax on the stupid rich?
• Your lyin' oven
• Oh yeah - the losses are going to be big.
• Will Marcellus be the baby name of the future in PA?

History...  

According to freshman in college...

History, a record of things left behind by past generations, started in 1815. Throughout the comparatively radical years 1815–1870 the western European continent was undergoing a Rampant period of economic modification. Industrialization was precipitating in England. Problems were so complexicated that in Paris, out of a city population of one million people, two million able bodies were on the loose.
Great Brittian, the USA and other European countrys had demicratic leanings. The middle class was tired and needed a rest. The old order could see the lid holding down new ideas beginning to shake. Among the goals of the chartists were universal suferage and an anal parliment. Voting was done by ballad. [More]

A hilarious/depressing  collection gleaned from actual papers by one professor.

Better let your breath out...  

Like many observers, the addition of fiscal hawk Paul Ryan to the Republican ticket strikes me as bad news for those hoping for a farm bill anywhere close to the dream of a full safety hammock net:

If the president is for it, House leaders are going to be even more entrenched against it. Moreover, passing a farm bill would highlight lawmakers approving a measure that the Republican vice presidential nominee has strongly criticized in the past and unsuccessfully tried to change by demanding further program cuts. They simply can't pass a bill that would appear to be an affront to one of their own now running on the presidential ticket.

In his budget plan, "The Path to Prosperity," Ryan stated that lawmakers should reduce or eliminate direct payments, which was considered a foregone conclusion. But, like President Obama's budget proposal, Ryan also sought in his plan to "reform the open-ended nature of the government support for crop insurance, so that agricultural producers assume the same kind of responsibility for managing risk that other businesses do."

The "record-breaking prosperity of American farmers and farm communities" demand re-examining federal farm programs "to ensure that taxpayers aren't funding support for a sector that is more than capable of thriving on its own," Ryan stated. [More]

Chris has this nailed, I think. The first quoted sentence is the important one. I can see Obama moving from farm indifference to admiration for a new political chip by taking up the farm bill cause in stark contrast to Ryan's longstanding opposition. And Republicans simply cannot even hint at agreeing with this president on anything, at least not before the election is over.

It's not like the measure was sailing along anyway, and with increasing stridency from the Tea Party and right-wing think tanks, all bets are off on all parts of the bill.

In fact, my strongest inclination is that a combination of whopping crop insurance payouts by the government, budget cuts, and chickens like ethanol (which has always been controversial) coming home to roost, the next farm program could be so meager most farmers will opt out due to a very low benefit/hassle ratio.

In the process, we may find ourselves oddly happier and more in control of our farms and futures.

The inflation groundswell...  

Another noted economist who is normally counted among inflation hawks sees some value in moderately rising prices:

Second, many (if not necessarily all) central banks will eventually figure out how to generate higher inflation expectations. They will be driven to tolerate higher inflation as a means of forcing investors into real assets, to accelerate deleveraging, and as a mechanism for facilitating downward adjustment in real wages and home prices.

It is nonsense to argue that central banks are impotent and completely unable to raise inflation expectations, no matter how hard they try. In the extreme, governments can appoint central bank leaders who have a long-standing record of stating a tolerance for moderate inflation – an exact parallel to the idea of appointing “conservative” central bankers as a means of combating high inflation. [More]

But oddly enough, even as I look for more government action to raise inflation expectations, hard assets only increase in attractiveness for a place to store wealth. Farmland, for example could prove an investment for all [economic] seasons, as it is a legendary inflation hedge. While this was widely held during the bubble of the seventies, I think it would at a minimum be as good a choice to mitigate general inflation as any alternative, and undoubtedly better than cash, since inflation will precede interest rates.

Finally...  

I think I know what the buzz-phrase of our day means.

The sooner the market regulators figure this out, the better off investors will be. Until then, we have a Central Bank driven market (if not quite CB run economy, as Congress has abdicated their role). The hated phrase Risk Off/Risk On actually translates into “What will bankers do next? Here is my guess and here is my bet.”
As noted above, “if the flaw is systemic, it requires only a small twist of fate for the next incident to result in disaster.” That is what we have today. The combination of HFT/Algos and Central Bank intervention has turned the concept of fundamental investing into a quaint anachronism.
“Modern disaster prevention can and should be about stopping trouble before it strikes, not cleaning up afterward.” I suspect that one day, things like macroeconomic trends and earnings will matter much more than they do today. It is likely going to take a significant dislocation to get there. . . [More]

As alluded to in the Junkbox above, I will be exploring more of the myth challenging work about investing being done by economists. It seesm to be confirming my belief there aren't many attractive (safe, rewarding, understandable) places to put cash these days.

Junkbox, Episode CD...  

Time to make this crop go away.

• My favorite Olympic story 
• Why the Farm Bill as we know it is in big trouble 
• My commute could become the highlight of my week
• My favorite meme: the savings glut. Plus bubbles!
• I was with you until the kangaroo butlers
• The awful new realization about stocks

On a lighter note, we just received last night our largest single rain event since last November - 2.75". Way too late for corn, except maybe the high amylose, but could help fill a few bean pods. The coverage was minimal - about 5 miles wide, 10 miles long.

How I learned to love...  

Olympic sailing.

 

Coming soon...  

 To an exchange near you:

 [Source]

This astonishing GIF comes from Nanex, and shows the amount of high-frequency trading in the stock market from January 2007 to January 2012. (Which means that the Knightmare craziness of last week is not included.)
The various colors, as identified in the legend on the right, are all the different US stock exchanges. You might think there are only two stock exchanges in the US, but you’d be wrong: there are only two exchanges where stocks are listed. There are many, many more exchanges where stocks are traded.
What we see here is relatively low levels of high-frequency trading through all of 2007. Then, in 2008, a pattern starts to emerge: a big spike right at the close, at 4pm, which is soon mirrored by another spike at the open. This is the era of traders going off to play golf in the middle of the day, because nothing interesting happens except at the beginning and the end of the trading day. But it doesn’t last long.
By the end of 2008, odd spikes in trading activity show up in the middle of the day, and of course there’s a huge flurry of activity around the time of the financial crisis. And then, after that, things just become completely unpredictable. There’s still a morning spike for most of 2009, but even that goes away eventually, to be replaced with sheer noise. Sometimes, like at the end of 2010, high-frequency trading activity is very low. At other times, like at the end of 2011, it’s incredibly high. Intraday spikes can happen at any time of day, and volumes can surge and fall back in pretty much random fashion.
It’s certainly fair to say that if you take a long, five-year view, then you can see a clear rise in trading activity. But it’s also fair to say that there’s something quite literally out of control going on here. Just as the quants at Knight found themselves unable to turn off their machines for 30 long minutes last week, the HFT world in aggregate seemingly has a mind of its own when it comes to trading patterns. Or, to put it another way, if there’s a pattern here, it’s one incomprehensible to human minds. [More]

This is a computerized battle between "algobots" - algorithm-driven computers trying to make tiny bits of money very rapidly and repeatedly. Supposedly this was going to make the markets more efficient, but doubts are beginning to rise among observers everywhere of every political view. Known as high-frequency trading (HFT), it has been a real money-maker for exchanges, but it seems diminishing returns are setting in.

I agree. The problem with HFT isn't that we know it's dangerous, it's that we don't know anything at all. It's become flatly too complex for even its creators to understand what their creations are doing. Here's an example. The heart of HFT is speed: even the speed-of-light delay can make a difference, so most HFT shops locate their computers as close to the stock exchanges as possible. Even a few milliseconds can make a difference. At least, that's what a company called UNX thought until it moved from Burbank to New York:

This is where the story gets, as [Scott] Harrison put it, weird. He explains: “When we got everything set up in New York, the trades were faster, just as we expected. We saved thirty-five milliseconds by moving everything east. All of that went exactly as we planned.”
“But all of a sudden, our trading costs were higher. We were paying more to buy shares, and we were receiving less when we sold. The trading speeds were faster, but the execution was inferior. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. We spent a huge amount of time confirming the results, testing and testing, but they held across the board. No matter what we tried, faster was worse.”
“Finally, we gave up and decided to slow down our computers a little bit, just to see what would happen. We delayed their operation. And when we went back up to sixty-five milliseconds of trade time, we went back to the top of the charts. It was really bizarre. I mean, there we were in the most efficient market in the world, with trillions of dollars changing hands every second, and we’d clearly gotten faster moving to New York. And yet we’d also gotten worse. And then we improved by slowing down. It was the oddest thing. In a world that values speed so much, you could be slower, yet still be better.”

The problem here isn't that UNX's move failed, it's that Harrison still doesn't know why it failed. Until we do, allowing HFT bots to control our equity markets is just begging for a catastrophe.
And that's where the transaction tax comes in. HFT works by making tiny amounts of money on a huge number of trades. Even a tiny tax, maybe a quarter of a percent per trade, would make HFT unprofitable and would put our markets back in the hands of human beings. Those human beings will still screw up, but at least there's a limit to how fast and how badly they can do it. [More]

I think the lesson is clear for farmers: Enter at your own risk. If you think this is confined to stocks you are thinking wishfully. And if you think individual investors can compete in such a trading environment, you don't understand the nature of the problem.

Our commodity markets will likely become completely counterintuitive as more HFT creeps into their volume. Farmers won't play the board - they will be little noticed roadkill.

The state of play...  

Climate change remains the forbidden topic for farmers. Even as new reports buttress anthropogenic global warming, few producers buy into it. Consider Chris Clayton's experience recently.

I spent much of the past week on a bus with about 50 members of No-Till on the Plains. The bus was filled with farmers from Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. We picked up others from the Dakotas and Canada who also joined parts of the tour.

They were skeptical about the impacts of climate change due to carbon emissions amounting to a mere 392 parts per million. But these farmers do believe in the value of putting carbon back into the soil. Farmers on the tour and the farmers we visited see a critical need to reduce soil erosion, increase organic matter on the soil and reduce the export of nutrients off the land. [More]

There is no reason to support carbon sequestration unless it causes heat-trapping GHGs. So how can producers hold illogical positions with such ferocity? (Note the comments on the above post)

The answer may be in in what Jonathon Haidt described as the moral foundations, because we are not making a scientific decision here - we are making a moral (right/wrong) choice. For social conservatives he found that preserving the institutions that support a moral community is their highest value. [Good summary here]

For example, when choices are presented that violate loyalty to our [conservative] group, it is wrong to do so. Period. Evidence/science/reason be damned. This devotion to this moral foundation yields wonderful social capital: cohesiveness, strong ties, discipline, predictability, etc. But it has the effect of making such groups susceptible to falling off cliffs, as they cannot change direction easily or with any speed in the face of even severe challenges.

Consequently the cognitive dissonance of holding mutually exclusive logical positions is somehow seen as less important than honoring our allegiances. But being reminded of it is upsetting because we can only answer in moral, not scientific terms.

The report in question is sobering.

Before 1980, excessively hot summers were practically non-existent. More recently, found a new study, summers that averaged 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than normal have become common – covering about 10 percent of land area around the globe each year – up from an average of just a few tenths of a percent in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. In some recent years, super-hot summers have struck as much as 20 percent of the Northern Hemisphere.
Statistically, the pattern is too extreme to be considered a result of chance, found a new study, which pointed a finger directly at global warming as the underlying cause of the recent spike in extra-hot summers.
With projected warming over the next 50 years, the study predicted that summers averaging 5.5 Fahrenheit above normal will happen regularly. In a decade, nearly 17 percent of the globe will likely be experiencing scorching summers each year.
“The problem is that there’s always this caveat when people say, ‘Well, you can’t blame any individual event on global warming,’” said James Hansen, a climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

“But what we show is that you can blame this strong change in the bell curve (of temperature distributions) on global warming. And that change has really made a remarkable impact on the chance of the likelihood of extreme weather events.”[More]

 While the time period of the report is relatively short, the math is persuasive. But math is not where it's at for many of us. So powerful are affiliations on the far right, that any position that even hints of agreement with Obama (who seems to be the focal point) is betrayal.


This is also, I think, why compromise is simply not in the cards any time soon in Washington. In fact, that's what I'm planning on. If Obama is defeated (which is the object - conservatives are less focused on electing Romney), it may be more flexibility to negotiate will emerge. Another possibility is that social conservatism will fall prey to its own demographics and simply constitute a diminishing fraction of the political spectrum, allowing them to vote no and have less effect.

The farm bill is in deep trouble, regardless. [Note: other observers disagree] The far right doesn't like anything about it and will throw ag under the bus to cut off food stamp "spongers". For that part, almost no economist of any stripe likes ag subsidies, and the far right (AEI, Heritage, Cato) positively despises them.


Crop insurance is very vulnerable and the timing could not be worse. Just as climate change has me rethinking the odds on crop insurance, actually having to pay more if not all the premium complicates the matter. This could be the last year of a well-cushioned safety net, at least one paid for by other taxpayers.

Major League Opening Sentence...  

I submit this entry:

When most Americans talk about good-tasting water, they’re talking about water that tastes like their own spit. [More]

Actually a very informative article for us drought-ravaged drinkers. As water tables drop, the old well water can take on an interesting new flavor.

Disaster may be too mild...  

At the risk of agreeing with The Gulk, I think more of us may be getting some rude surprises as we venture into fields that until recently looked decent, if not lush.

The availability bias is clearly in play here, I admit. But, if his experience matches others in areas that have actually had some rain, but didn't pollinate well, more than the Eastern Corn Belt is corn toast.

And his assessment of a "terrifying corn balance sheet" is not hyperbole, I suspect. I also bow to his undoubtedly clearer thinking: he has crop insurance. I do not.

IL on the whole doesn't do well with CI. Over the long term, we get about 43¢ back from every dollar in premium. But that's for the whole state. When you look at my "darn-near drought-proof*" acres, the payout is even less attractive.

 [Click to embiggen] [Source]

Once again, I accept full and final responsibility for my lack of insurance and the consequences due to a Black Swan event like this. I just wish I hadn't spent the last two years preaching about BS events, even pointing out climate change as our most likely BS possibility.

Still, it looks like early planted, early maturing hybrids will make something with three digits. I think we will also see some hybrids with a total FAIL across farms as a result of this year. Which makes seed supply a huge question mark.

But as I thought about it in church this morning, what I think will occur in our professional community will be very similar to a death in the family. Farmers will fluctuate between anger, grief, despair, determination, and courage during a drawn out mourning period. We will know professional embarrassment (This is MY field?) and personal reassessment of how competent we think we are.

It will take time and frankly, rain, to bring closure. So if we're still warm and dry by say, Thanksgiving, I expect some unprecedented decisions and actions. These reactions will impact those around us and along our value chain.

History looks like this. And we are slowly realizing that's what we are writing right now. That's a good thing. If you know it's one for the record books, you want to leave a good account of your own part.

Even if you have to fake it.


*Actual brag from the author. File under: Hubris In Progress

Junkbox, Episode NSRTFRK...  

Pull out the combines - let's make this one go away.

• Refresher course on the August crop report (note the last line)
• Tyler Cowen warms to inflation? Has the world gone sane?
• Popular music: data support my opinion
• Conservation just can't get out of the crosshairs
• Sick people are the problem. How to not be one is problem #2.
• Yet another foreign coal market?

 Wow - a brief moment of intense cloudiness! Maybe we can break 1/4" for July!

There's a nap for that...  

And it's ten minutes long.

You heard me.

The 5-minute nap produced few benefits in comparison with the no-nap control. The 10-minute nap produced immediate improvements in all outcome measures (including sleep latency, subjective sleepiness, fatigue, vigor, and cognitive performance), with some of these benefits maintained for as long as 155 minutes. The 20-minute nap was associated with improvements emerging 35 minutes after napping and lasting up to 125 minutes after napping. The 30-minute nap produced a period of impaired alertness and performance immediately after napping, indicative of sleep inertia, followed by improvements lasting up to 155 minutes after the nap.

CONCLUSIONS:

These findings suggest that the 10-minute nap was overall the most effective afternoon nap duration of the nap lengths examined in this study. The implications from these results also suggest a need to consider a process occurring in the first 10 minutes of sleep that may account for the benefits associated with brief naps. [more]

Some obvious caveats:

1. The test group was miserably small (24) and non-representative.
2. The researchers were Australians

 My only problem is I seem to be on the road or in the field when I need a nap.

Google to the rescue (but not in my lifetime, I doubt).

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, USDA!...  

From the recent July 2012 Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Update:

Production:
• Beef: 2011 annual production was changed from 36,195 million pounds to 26,195 million pounds.
• Pork: 2011 annual production was changed from 22,752 million pounds to 22,758 million pounds.
• Pork: Third quarter 2012 production was changed from 5,260 million pounds to 5,620 million pounds.
• Total red meat and poultry: Annual 2012 production was changed from 92,132 million pounds to 92,140 million pounds.
• Total red meat and poultry: Annual 2013 production was changed from 92,742 million pounds to 92,052 million pounds. 

[My emphasis]

Ten million freaking pounds!!!  How do you miss by dang near 40%??

This is hardly confidence inspiring. It involves - to my untrained eye - a spreadsheet cell that should contain a formula adding the four quarters.  Something like:

=SUM(Q1...Q4)

The quarterly numbers seem about right:  ~6.5 million pounds.  So the only way to get 36 M pounds is to a) have a basic and obvious error b) override the total.

Or maybe call it a typo, which itself is damning evidence of incompetence.

Here is a screen shot of the erroneous table:

Sheesh!


Another bushel of trust in the accuracy and integrity of USDA reports is lost.

Worst book covers...  

My favorite:

 [More]

And along with the commentator below, I too use my Kindle (on iPad) to read stuff which would likely have an embarrassing cover.  Such as "Return to the Planet of Sorority Babes" and other meaningful space operas.

Why the surge in digital demand? Privacy is one explanation. Erotic titles with racy covers are believed to sell better as e-books because the technology removes the embarrassment of toting them around in public – and the same may be true of spiritual titles, experts say. Book jackets covered in angels and rainbows may be equally uncomfortable for some people to read in public, says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, a publisher of self-published e-books. “These books can be sampled, purchased and read without the judgmental eyes of a clerk at the cash register, or colleagues who might glance at the cover.” Plus, digital bibles and sex trilogies are only as heavy as your Kindle Fire, he says. [More]

What if this leads to a lot more reading of a lot more dubious literature?  Good new? Bad news?

Dunno.

Just to get some perspective...  

In case all you've been able to see are fields struggling to hold on...



 

Cool music too.

How many Japanese economists...  

Does it take to replace a light bulb? 

Who cares? Because we may all be about to become one.

It’s beginning to look like Keynes was wrong about liquidity traps, at least when he argued that there’s a certain minimum nominal yield that government bond investors demand, and that long term rates can be reduced no further.  Wherever people draw a line, bond yields just seem to plunge right through, to one record low after another.  And we know from Japan that they can go even lower.  But what does this mean?
It probably means multiple things.  For instance it suggests that the Keynesian/market monetarist AD pessimists and the Great Stagnation AS pessimists are both right.  We are looking at BOTH low inflation and low real GDP growth for many years to come.  Why don’t I think AD explanations are enough?   Partly because even the 20 year T-bond now has a negative real yield. Indeed it suggests the Bernanke “global savings glut” hypothesis is also correct, a point I’ve argued previously.  Japan is the future of the world. [More]

I have been trying to grasp the nature of this savings glut for the last few years. Nothing else really explains why interest rates refuse to climb or inflation is almost trivial, even with commodity volatility.

Simply put, we (the world) have much more saved than there is to invest in. Not only that but we suddenly have gotten fiscal religion and are repaying debt like crazy.

So what is going on? The main answer is that this is what happens when you have a “deleveraging shock,” in which everyone is trying to pay down debt at the same time. Household borrowing has plunged; businesses are sitting on cash because there’s no reason to expand capacity when the sales aren’t there; and the result is that investors are all dressed up with nowhere to go, or rather no place to put their money. So they’re buying government debt, even at very low returns, for lack of alternatives. Moreover, by making money available so cheaply, they are in effect begging governments to issue more debt. [More]

It truly counterintuitive to grasp that assets and debts are really just two sides of the same transaction. Our seemingly horrifying debt is also the retirement fund for Mom and Dad (bonds). So the more we stress to save, not spend, the more we need investments to put those savings in.

It is also a comment about demographics and its effects on national economies. That is the real meaning, IMHO, when we see Japan as our future.

In short, Japan's economy works better for those middle-aged and older than it does for the young. But it is not yet in crisis, and economists say there is plenty it could do to raise its potential growth rate, as well as to lower its debt burden.
Last weekend Yoshihiko Noda, the prime minister, took a brave shot at promoting reform when he said Japan planned to start consultations towards joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This is an American-backed free-trade zone that could lead to a lowering of tariffs on a huge swath of goods and services. Predictably it is elderly farmers, doctors and small businessmen who are most against it.
Reforms to other areas, such as the tax and benefit system, might be easier if the government could tell the Japanese a different story: not that their economy is mired in stagnation, but that its performance reflects the ups and downs of an ageing society, and that the old as well as the young need to make sacrifices.
The trouble is that the downbeat narrative is deeply ingrained. The current crop of leading Japanese politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen are themselves well past middle age. Many think they have sacrificed enough since the glory days of the 1980s, when Japan's economy seemed unstoppable. Mr Weinstein says they suffer from “diminished-giant syndrome”, nervously watching the economic rise of China. If they compared themselves instead with America and Europe, they might feel heartened enough to make some of the tough choices needed. [More]

While eyes strain to make the first sighting of inflation or rising interest rates, the fact we are so afraid of seeing them almost insures their delayed arrival. In the face of real numbers on CD rates we cling to cash and cash equivalents like...a bunch of old people.

The super wicked problem...  

I have long since forsaken the naive hope of convincing farmers about the threat of global warming. In a world of "alternative information systems" such as .net websites with black backgrounds, too many fonts and lots of exclamation points, we all can have our own facts.

Climate change is an issue that is now beyond coherent discussion, especially in the public relam, but certainly even among friends. We've learned to just not go there.

How shall we ever address this?  Some suggestions are popping up.

One lesson to be learned here is that environmental issues can no longer speak for themselves.  Unlike the images of urban haze from the 1960s, stories of anxious polar bears or dried up waterbeds fail to generate public mobilization on climate change issues.  In fact, a study by Sol Hart and Erik Nisbet suggests that increasing public knowledge about climate change does not lead to greater support of climate policies.  Merely transmitting information about environmental repercussions—no matter the degree of impact on the human or natural environment—is not enough to persuade the population of the public who is already disengaged or dismissive about climate change. 
Instead, Hart and Nisbet’s study points to the important role of social cues in interpreting climate news.  Participants in the study were more receptive to and persuaded by a story about climate change effects when the community involved was socially similar to their own (in this case, farmers in up-state New York verses farmers in France).  The public, on both sides of the political fence, are more likely to rally behind an environmental cause when they can personally relate to the people or places in question, suggesting that localizing climate change in terms of impacts and policy action is an important path forward. 
There is significant opportunity for the climate change movement to adopt new media strategies in order to reach larger populations of the public.  Integrating social cues and increasing the relevancy of climate stories is one encouraging method.  Others include introducing climate change issues under existing frameworks, such as public health or the moral responsibility to protect innocents, as was the case in campaigns against smoking and Big Tobacco.  These strategies can help untangle the super-wicked problems of climate change so that the movement can generate alliances with people across political ideology and social identity. [More]

It could be that we'll be unlucky and see increased incidence of climatic extremes like this drought, and availability bias will swing public opinion toward acceptance of scientific opinion, even as that opinion continues to be buttressed by converted skeptics.

My own preferred response is to create the case that whatever decision we in ag make we are literally betting the farm. Aaron and I are betting this year is not the outlier we believe. Events like this will plague his growing career more so than my history. If we are wrong, we'll take the consequences, and we'll leave others free to choose their own path. But if asked, we will explain our reasons.

And how making no decision is a decision.

Mispeak Oil...  

A funny thing happened while we were looking for Peak Oil. It kinda went away. 

Maybe.

Sorta.

At any rate, debate has been rekindled by three interesting articles, all of which are serious reading.

First, the highly acclaimed environmental journalist for the Financial Times, George Monbiot, throws in the all-natural towel:

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.
Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.
Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia … cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)
Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time. [More worth reading]

The tipping point for him was a report by Leanardo Maugueri of Harvard (funded by BP, ahem).

But wait - there seems to be some doubt about Maugueri's numbers. In fact, considerable doubt. A rigorous criticism was published by an equally respected science journalist, Chris Nelder.

To his credit, Maugeri acknowledges that his analysis “is subject to a significant margin of error, depending on several circumstances that extend beyond the risks in each project or country,” and he details numerous important caveats. And to the extent that he reveals the assumptions underpinning his forecast, his transparency is laudable. In the final analysis, however, it is insufficient. He fails to provide adequate justification that his assumptions, being widely divergent from most other industry estimates, are remotely realistic.
We must conclude that the key assumptions about reserve growth and its effect on decline rates in Maugeri’s report are muddled, speculative and unverifiable. And sprinkling those assertions with repeated declamations about how peak oil is a non-issue, insisting repeatedly that the only real constraints on his scenario have to do with political decisions and geopolitical risks, suggests that his report is more about grinding a political axe on behalf of the oil industry than offering a serious or transparent analysis. Finally we must note that Maugeri is well known for his hostility to peak oil, as is BP, which funded his report. After taking real-world risks, costs, and restrictions into account, the case for peak oil—which is about production rates, not production capacity or reserves—seems far more realistic. [More]

Finally, The Oil Drum, the blog for oil geeks, picks up the thread and adds the best comments to boot.

Summary Maugeri's analysis and conclusions are critically dependent upon the decline rates applied to existing and future fields, and yet he does not explicitly say what these decline rates will be. However, Maugeri’s assumptions can be derived from his Table 2, which projects gross and net capacity additions over the period to 2020. Doing so suggests he uses an average annual decline rate for all fields of 1.6% over this period, which is less than half of the IEA and CERA estimates for 2008 (4.1%/year and 4.5%/year respectively). The discrepancy is even greater since the IEA and other analysts project an increase in average decline rates over the 2011-20 period. If we replace Maugeri’s 1.6% decline rate assumption with the IEA estimate of 4.1%, the projected loss of production capacity over the period to 2020 increases from 11 mb/d to 26.5 mb/d. In turn, the projected global production capacity in 2020 reduces from 110.6 mb/d to 95.1mb/d (a reduction of 14%). Since average decline rates would be expected to increase over this period, this projection must be considered optimistic. [More]

While I think I'm trying to be impartial, I probably am carrying my own biases into this fray, but Sorrell's point about decline rates vs. depletion rates is abstruse but convincing for me.  I have never been fascinated with Peak Oil because I wasn't sure what it really meant in everyday terms. Clearly the US production boom has made it seem like there is no real problem in the immediate future (for us anyway).

But looking at actual output trends as the critics do, I can't swallow the enormous production increases predicted in the Maugueri report. The larger picture is the linkage to climate change. If we get better and better evidence that CO2 is an major and immediate problem, the amount of oil we can pump is merely a measure of how fast we can drastically alter the environment for the worse.

In fact, those numbers are really depressing. It is not rocket math either.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.
We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain. [More]

While skeptics don't think the 2℃ is all that scary, more of us are growing uncomfortable with the 0.8℃ we've already managed to produce. Not to be a doomsayer, but I just don't see much happening until way too late. And given the current state of domestic and global policy debate, the first few decades will be spent assigning blame to win elections even if we do decide we're in trouble.

The best drought graphic yet...  

From the NYT. For librul MSM, they do a decent job on stuff like this.

[Click to enlarge]

[Wait -the dates didn't copy. So lower right is 1896. Upper left is 2012. Read left-to-right in each row]

The white other meat...

This struck me as an idea that might reshape protein markets...along with sky-high feed costs. 

Brown got into fake meat after working in the clean-energy business. He says he loves the taste of meat, but his childhood on a family farm convinced him to refrain from killing animals*, and he’s been vegan for many years. In 2009, he met Fu-Hung Hsieh and Harold Huff, food scientists at the University of Missouri who’d been working to create a meat substitute for more than a decade. The three formed a company, and they’ve been working to build the perfect fake meat ever since.

The process has moved along in fits and starts. “It’s a combination lock,” Brown says. “There are three different parameters we’re working with—heat, cooling, and pressure.” To make the meat, the firm starts with a powdered protein—for the chicken strips, they’re using soy; for the beef, they’ll use a protein from a kind of pea—that they form into a liquid paste. The paste is heated, then it’s extruded through a machine that resembles a pasta press, and then cooled. “It was a process of trial and error to get all of those to align exactly right in the right sequence,” Brown says. “But if you do—if you get the heating and cooling sequence right, and you apply exactly the right pressure through the extrusion—you get the proteins to align in a way that makes them almost indistinguishable from animal proteins.”

Brown says that other hurdles remain, and Beyond Meat is constantly working to refine its methods. Making the perfect fake beef is harder than making chicken, because people expect real beef to look a bit red, from blood. Beyond Meat can add a red hue using beet juice or other natural colorants, but Brown doesn’t know yet if people will consider it strange to have bloody-looking fake meat. This sounds like a trivial factor, but one study has shown that a meat substitute’s appearance is the most important factor to consumers—even before you taste it, you decide whether fake meat is acceptable based on how it looks.

Over time, Brown believes, the firm will get all these little details just right. He’s also confident that society will accept his innovations just as it has adapted to tech revolutions of the past. “Once, we had the horse-drawn carriage, and then we had the horse-less carriage, and then we had the automobile,” he says. “I’m firmly convinced we’re going to go from beef and chicken products that are animal in origin to those that are made with plants—and at some point in the future you’ll walk down the aisle of the supermarket and ask for beef and chicken, and like the automobile has no relationship to the horse, what you get will have nothing to do with animals.” [More]

More reviews here, here, here.

Commercial ag has been justifiably dismissive of the faux meat market threat, yet it is hard not to sense a number of things to cause rethinking.

First, the animal cruelty cause doesn't seem to be going away. We're just a Walmart away from junking gestation crates everywhere - without any loathsome government regs to blame.

Second, as shown above the meat imposters are getting better, and given our preference for prepared (i.e. seasoned and cooked) food, the differences apparent raw begin to become meaningless. All they need is some economies of scale to undercut real meat, and I think a significant market share could switch, at least in categories like frozen dinners.

Finally, as pork and beef follow chicken into near total concentration due to economic pressure from feed costs, public connections to producers will likely unravel. CAFO's just look like CAFO's. And they don't match what the public wants farms to look like. Or what we peddle in the PR marketplace.

*But what really struck me was the highlighted line above. I thought putting kids to work (on ROPS-less tractors, for example) was how you made them stalwart champions of producing food the way Grandpa did.

Perhaps not always.

Yeah, I know...  

I haven't been posting much at all, but I finally decided something had to give. Nonetheless, I miss it, and when I'm retired (date now postponed), I will be back to considerably more activity. Here's where we are in my corner of the Dozen Drought™.

• Last rain 5 weeks ago. Maybe 6 days over 100℉ so far. We are on full water conservation right now as in "Does anybody else need to go?" Rural water district is still 3 years away, but the process to get funding is inching forward. Why do I think this program is likely to be axed during budget talks?
• My March 28 corn (short season) experiment is dented, and the milk line halfway. The shucks are dry and some ears dropping. Leaves fired up to the ear. It counts out to a decent yield, but does the ear drop signal poor test weight? Estimate harvest about 18 August.
• Meanwhile, the full season high amylose corn is strange looking. Variable height, even though it is single cross. Good ears, but just beginning to dent. It was planted late April. Generally yields about 70% of regular corn, but in droughts does comparatively better. No idea how the ears will hold up.
• Beans are waist high, have pods and look OK, except when leaves are flipped in the afternoon. Cripes, how can you tell? A friend who sprayed a fungicide/insecticide mix seems to be on to something. I will look into it next year.
• Spoke to IA Farm Bureau this week. I emceed the whole meeting and the talk there was how fast the road to riches turned south. Driving from home to Ames to Lanesboro, MN showed me plenty of decent corn, although every patch of lighter, higher soil is starting to brown. Also it seems much father behind than home. SE MN looked great. People were actually mowing lawns.
• Speaking with every expert I can find, I am amazed at the range of indemnity payout exposure for the government: $12-50B. While insurance companies and reinsurers are on the hook for much of it, I think the Treasury takes over after certain limits are hit. If this does result in a big hole in the budget, it seems to me a switch to an all insurance-type farm bill gets tougher, especially if it gets booted to next year. The new scheme already has big exposure from low prices. 
• I've got a friend who thinks he will be over $200/A better off than if he had raised 200 BPA corn at $5 due to CI.  Is this a feature or a bug? I am uncomfortable with that being how we make a living in ag. Of course, it is a one-time boondoggle maybe, but still. Reminds me of the Dakota Shuffle.
• I guess premiums could go through the roof next year as a result. I say all this stuff because as part of the 15% (about 40% in my area) who have never had insurance, I am not fully initiated into the deeper mysteries. The curious thing is I can't lose anything if the insurance program gets cut - a perverse comfort.
• I will reconsider crop insurance next year unless we get a mess of rain before March. I suspect it will be a tough call for us, due to a puny APH, uninsurable crops, and expected high premiums. However, I don't want my philosophical positions to pollute Aaron's analysis.
• We have prepared our Apocalypse Budget, and have ways to draw down the equity we put all those premiums we didn't pay into. Looks like we just may skate by, if beans can make 30. Family member and long-time landowners are helping, which is why we have been voluntarily raising rents for years. I think we can make them whole over the next 2-3 years.
• Signed on for another year with Farm Journal. I was drifting toward giving up the commute and responsibility, but I would miss the guys and I am hideously overpaid. Humor articles, however, are little tricky right now.

Like everyone experiencing a painful Black Swan event, I am sure my brain isn't working at optimal efficiency. This is another reason I haven't been posting. The savage political atmosphere doesn't help and I don't want to rant. Frankly, I'm having trouble concentrating.

So I'm just woodworking in the Greenhouse Support Structure. I forked out for a split-unit air conditioner. It works great and is remarkably efficient (SEER = 19). Coupled with time-of-day electricity pricing, I can keep a/c costs quite low. Plus I can't see the fields from inside.

FWIW.

Obamacare for farmers...  

Bruce got that right.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

BTW, I have never seen Bruce so stiff. Of course, I would be sooooo cool on Colbert....

Junkbox, Episode MMXIII...  

Not too soon to plan for next year's challenges.  BTW, I heard from an industry insider crop insurance rates could be breathtaking next year.

• Fracking is berra, berra good for some farmers even without a shale play.
• Would switching to ℃ make it feel cooler?
• Maybe they should change their occupation name.
• How many uninsured people in the US?
• What happens when we're #2? (Spoiler: not much)
• But on the other hand won't it make them harder to persuade to change?