I just might make it...

By "I", I mean "we", of course.  Even though I'll be flitting to Cargill meetings this week, our harvest might be done by the breakfast I'm speaking at for the Marketing Rally.

As you can guess, there is plenty of room for late-comers, so if you're done or getting close, restart your marketing for 2009 and 2010 (yup - I'm selling corn and beans both now).

Click here to register, and good luck this week.

Just a little luck...

We all could use some, especially when we try stuff like this:






[via neuroworld]

The meaning of hungry...

In a wonderfully concise post, Raj Patel illuminates the way we count hungry people here in the US and around the world.  While the idea of food security is one key data set here, the more stark picture is by counting calories.

So it's useful to have other ways of measuring the depth of hunger. Counting the number of calories that individuals get to eat every day is how the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) measures hunger in the world. They count how many people eat less than 1900 calories a day, and their index of hunger is 'undernourishment'. According to their most recent estimates, 1.02 billion people will be undernourished in 2009. Overwhelmingly these people were in poor countries (just over 15 million people were undernourished in rich countries from 2004 to 2006--if the global measure of hunger was "food insecurity," the number of hungry would be substantially higher).

The data used to calculate undernourishment helps to compass the depth of hunger, the degree to which people are going seriously without calories every day. By counting the average calorie intake of people who are already undernourished, you can get a sense of how badly off the hungry are. When their average intake is 300 calories below the minimum daily intake of 1900, they're considered intensely food deprived. The countries with deepest levels of hunger are Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Belize, where a hungry person has an average daily calorie intake of 430 calories below the minimum acceptable. [More]

Doing the math as you are inhaling Thanksgiving smells from the kitchen is a battle between your brain and your stomach, but suffice it to say 1900 calories is not much.

Hunger in the world is a sign of political failure and economic inefficiencies. It is also reflective of the need for labor and economic mobility and freer trade.  These ideas currently are out of favor, so I expect the statistics for hunger, however calculated, to get worse in the foreseeable future.

Good news!...

We're now the worst case scenario.

If you've been wondering why index funds have been pouring money into commodities when it makes no fundamental sense, you're not alone.

A third explanation is that investors are making increasing use of commodities as an investment class. Although Treasury Inflation Protected Securities offer a hedge against an increase in the U.S. consumer price index, they don't offer protection for foreign investors against depreciation of the dollar. Insofar as increases in the prices of commodities like oil may depress real economic activity, holding commodities as an investment also offers useful diversification against risks to equities. Particularly when interest rates are low, there is an incentive to hoard physical commodities as an investment vehicle.

The paper by Tang and Xiong proposes that the increased use of commodities as a financial investment accounts for the increasing correlation among commodity price changes over time. In support of that claim, they note the growing popularity of investment strategies based on the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index or the Dow Jones Commodity Index. Tang and Xiong document that correlations among commodities included in the indexes have increased faster than those not included. For example, one of the regressions they estimate relates the return on commodity i to equity returns, bond yields, the value of the dollar, and oil prices, where the coefficients are allowed to grow with time at different rates before and after 2004, and with different trends on these coefficients estimated for commodities included in indexes as for those excluded. The figure below shows their estimated time path for the coefficient on oil prices comparing the indexed and non-indexed groups.  [More]

And it's probably because you think the world economy is not about to collapse - you giddy fool, you.

In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.  
...

SocGen advises bears to sell the dollar and to "short" cyclical equities such as technology, auto, and travel to avoid being caught in the "inherent deflationary spiral". Emerging markets would not be spared. Paradoxically, they are more leveraged to the US growth than Wall Street itself. Farm commodities would hold up well, led by sugar. [More][My emphasis]

Of course, they're French, but still I feel better.

Before you slip into sinful error with your bird...

Remember, stuffing is evil.



[via ezra]

Don't shoot the personable messenger...

FWIW:

"Studies Suggest Males Have More Personality"

[More]

Serious science has verified what common sense has made obvious for years.

 

Maybe not a battle...

Military metaphors are all the vogue, and the hard-pressed animal agriculture sector is frequently described in terms like "attacks", and "offensive".  While the debates being carried on in such terms may seem useful to "rally troops", the whole symbology could be misleading and counter-productive.

To be sure there is heated rhetoric, but name one arena of public contention that does not deploy over-the-top language to gain a few meager moments of public awareness?  This is a one-way emotional street, as well, with real mental and political difficulties to reverse.

But regardless of the individual arguments over meat consumption, biodiversity, healthy diets, animal care, global warming, or rural economic and social structure, I think a slowly merging flow can be detected.  More importantly, assessing the overall direction of these singular struggles may be the key for producers to planning well in this century.

I think I see a change in the nature of the discourse, at least at some levels. Notes of realism and compromise are popping up is diverse places. For example, Urban Lehner's typically thoughtful take has some powerful similarities with one of the economic blogging universe's superstars, Tyler Cowen.  First Lehner:

Problem is, even if the industry's right, these arguments may not win battles. Voters hear so many confusing and contradictory claims in the name of science that it's lost some of its power to persuade. If science says cages aren't cruel but voters see photos and film footage that make them squirm, my guess is they're going to believe their own eyes.

As for veganism, the question before the voters won't be whether to declare meat eating illegal; it will be whether the meat and eggs they eat should come from animals raised in cages and crates. Tell a carnivore that activists want to ban meat eating someday, and she'll tell you she'll vote no when that day arrives.

This is not something hog and poultry raisers want to hear, especially when many of them are bleeding red ink. It would be easier to win the battle if the science was conclusive and uncontradicted. It isn't. It would be easier to win the battle if it was over veganism -- and someday it might be. But today it's over cages.

To win the battles immediately ahead, the industry needs better arguments. It can offer halfway measures, like bigger, less-confining cages. The new Ohio board might do that. It can make clear how much more consumers will pay for meat and eggs if cages and crates are outlawed. It can point out that pricier cage-free eggs, free-range chicken and heritage pork are available, so if consumers feel strongly about farm-animal practices they can vote with their wallets.

In the end, the industry must somehow persuade voters animals aren't suffering. Otherwise, Ohio could end up being a melancholy victory -- or perhaps one of the industry's few victories, period. [More]

This well reasoned observation hardly fits with calls to arms by other livestock proponents. More importantly to me is the tone, which has been missing too long in the ag media, I think: grownup-to-grownup.

At the same time, Cowen - hardly a Pollanesque crusader - offers a similar logical approach.

Speaking of animal products, a few of you asked me a while ago how the eating of animals could possibly be morally justified.  My primary objection is to how we treat animals while they are alive, especially in factory farms.  The very rise and continuing existence of humanity is based on the widespread slaughter and extinction of other large mammals, not to mention other animals as well.  I'm not saying we should feel entirely comfortable with that, but rather a "non-aggression" stance toward other animals simply isn't possible, short of repudiating all of human civilization, even in its more primitive versions.  Everyone favors the murder of animals for human purposes, although different people draw the lines at different places.  I don't know of any good foundationalist approach to these issues, but at the very least we should be nicer to non-human animals at the margin and less willing to torture them.
At the policy level we should tax meat more heavily and regulate farms more strictly, for both environmental reasons and reasons of animal welfare.  I draw a line at where the life of the animal is "not worth living," but for me animal slaughter is not immoral per se. 
There are a few things you can do personally, including:
1. Buy less from factory farms.

2. Eat better meat and in turn eat less meat, substituting quality for quantity.  This is a common demographic pattern, so it shouldn't be too hard to mimic. [More]

It is hard to look at the American citizenry right now and think reasonableness will soon come into vogue, but I think it will.  The alternatives lack the power to endure.  Consequently, I see a future where such opinions will be commonplace, and our livestock industry will be reshaped as a result.

Nor am I sure raising the alarm about costs (our traditional fallback retort) will win over all those who think changes should be made. It's not 100% guaranteed what will happen to meat costs, as the system will adapt economically and productivity changes are hard to predict.  Mostly, warnings about rising costs don't have much traction.  Until people are confronted with the actuality, they tend to assume it may not happen. [This is one key problem with the health care debate].  Maybe we've simply been over-warned about too many economic possibilities.

But the cumulative effect of these several influences on the livestock sector  - not to mention the unruly grain markets - make assuming a return to old trends seem wishful thinking.  With all the above forces trending the directions they are, changes will occur. Not overnight nor universally, but powerfully and relentlessly.

We're not fighting battles, we're responding to new decisions by increasingly informed and empowered consumers.

So wrong...

In so many ways.



Ya think she won't wonder what she was thinking a few years from now?

[Thanks, Brandon]

OK - I'll start running again...

My meager attempt at exercise - running - has dwindled to sporadic episodes this year.  I have iron-clad excuses:

• I was traveling
• I just got home
• We were working extra hours
• It was raining
• My ____ hurt. (Fill in the sexagenarian blank)

 Meanwhile, my resistance to stress dwindled as well.  I must be part rat.

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

The stress-reducing changes wrought by exercise on the brain don’t happen overnight, however, as virtually every researcher agrees. In the University of Colorado experiments, for instance, rats that ran for only three weeks did not show much reduction in stress-induced anxiety, but those that ran for at least six weeks did. “Something happened between three and six weeks,” says Benjamin Greenwood, a research associate in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado, who helped conduct the experiments. Dr. Greenwood added that it was “not clear how that translates” into an exercise prescription for humans. We may require more weeks of working out, or maybe less. And no one has yet studied how intense the exercise needs to be. But the lesson, Dr. Greenwood says, is “don’t quit.” Keep running or cycling or swimming. (Animal experiments have focused exclusively on aerobic, endurance-type activities.) You may not feel a magical reduction of stress after your first jog, if you haven’t been exercising. But the molecular biochemical changes will begin, Dr. Greenwood says. And eventually, he says, they become “profound.” [More]

This year has been THE WORST farming year I have known.  Still, this is no excuse to roll over and let circumstance run my world.

This nondescript old body has brought me this far - it deserves better than my recent care.

Yikes - anybody looking at the long range forecast?...

Here's mine (east-central IL)  from Accuweather.

That's right  - teens and entire days below freezing.

At least the combine won't have trouble with the wet spots.

Not all agree.

A fast two decades...

As someone who read about the Berlin airlift in the Weekly Reader, the idea of the Berlin Wall being gone for twenty years was arresting.

So were these photos.

[More]

No reality here...

The uproar over mammogram guidelines is discouraging for anyone who thinks the cost over over-medicating and defensive medicine cannot continue.

In the midst of the debate over health care reform, we have been handed the perfect example of why America will never get health care costs under control: The furious reaction to new guidelines that recommend most women should get mammograms later in life and less frequently. [More]

As long as we cling to the idea that one life is worth all the wealth in the world and millions in the future should suffer for my well-being in the present we will be unable to adopt common sense measures like this recommendation. It's also why too many of us men will have unnecessary prostate surgery.

Doctors have routinely recommended prostate cancer screening for men over 50 using a blood test for prostate specific antigen, or PSA. The belief was that early diagnosis and aggressive treatment for any cancer is better than standing by and doing nothing.

But many prostate tumours are slow-growing and take years to cause harm. Some studies suggest many men are living with the side-effects of aggressive treatment with surgery and radiation for a cancer that may never have killed them.

The researchers said in the United States, fewer than 2 per cent of men with under age 65 opt to forgo prostate surgery in favour of regular testing for their cancers. And 73 per cent of those ultimately have surgery within four years.

But a separate study in the journal Cancer by researchers at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, found that men with early stage prostate cancer who put off the surgery in favour of regular checkups were not overcome by anxiety. [More]

Oddly enough this individual failure is precisely why we will eventually devolve to a system where the government makes such allocations.  Just as other developed nations have discovered.

One more time: we can't afford all the health care everyone wants.  If we can't devise a system to ration health care effectively, that's all our economy will be about. And yes, that is the correct verb.

And we will still have a mortality rate close to 100%.

I rate this as good news...

While we in the country insist on lots of local control over public matters, what it usually boils down to is politics and self-interest on a microscopic scale.  It also means very little gets done. Slowly.

When siting communications towers or wind farms, the best and worst of our civic commitment is on display.  Higher authority is not to be despised in such cases.

The unanimous “declaratory ruling” made good on a promise FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski made in an otherwise coolly received speech at an industry conference in early October. Under the new rules, state and local governments must act within 90 days of receiving an application for a co-location, that is, a tower site to be shared with other operators, and 150 days for other applications. Carriers have complained that governments are frustrating their efforts to improve coverage by sitting on tower applications indefinitely.

The FCC also ruled that state or local governments may not use the fact that wireless service is available from another carrier as ground for rejecting an application. And they may not require a zoning variance for every cell site. [More]

One small step for better broadband and phone coverage.

Not only Christmas...

Is coming.  The traditional Fall Farmer Meeting Season is about to commence - ready or not!  As you can see from my calendar at left the other left, I may not be around for closure on this harvest.

As I struggle to concentrate on the financial outcome for this year and the prognosis for 2010, I have realized one thing: I am not thinking very clearly.  I think I have pre-PHSD (Post Harvest Stress Disorder).

I am NOT equating my mental issues to veterans coping with PTSD or making a lame comparison.  For several years, however, I have noted a pronounced change in my mental processes after harvest - and this harvest is one for the books.

One thing that seems to help me is re-establishing my bearings by conferring with other producers and experts. So despite the obvious difficulties, I am glad to be a part of the FJ Marketing Rally.

I would enjoy the chance to visit with you there.  This could become the premier marketing meeting of the season, and the first one could be the pattern.  Do the calculation and if you can see making it, it could be another reward for enduring 2009.

Besides - and you didn't hear it from me - the talk about a free-for-all Jello-wrestling tournament  between the market analysts may not be that far off.

[It will take some time getting that image out of your mind, won't it?]

Looking forward to tweckling....

I don't tweet.  I have introductory phrases longer than 140 characters. So this new challenge for public speakers such as yours truly made my presenter-blood run cold.

Tweckle (twek'ul) vt. to abuse a speaker only to Twitter followers in the audience while he/she is speaking.
Conference speakers beware: Twecklers are watching.
They're out for blood.
And you may be their next victim.
Once upon a time, conference goers could do little more than passively fork their cheesecake when a snooze-inducing keynote speaker took the podium. No longer. The microblogging service Twitter is changing a staple of academic life from a one-way presentation into a real-time conversation. Flub a talk badly enough and you now risk mobilizing a scrum of digital-spitball-slinging snark-masters. This is from a higher-education conference in Milwaukee:

• we need a tshirt, "I survived the keynote disaster of 09"
  

The Twitter "back channel" can be a powerful tool to quickly knit a gathering of strangers into an online community, a place where attendees at meetings broadcast bits of sessions, share extra information such as links, and arrange social events. But the same technology can also enable a "virtual lynching." That's the phrase one twitster used to describe what happened at last month's HighEdWeb Association conference, an event that has gone down in social-media history as perhaps the most brutal abuse of the back channel yet.
The setting was a midday keynote speech before some 400 college professionals in Milwaukee. The presenter was David Galper of the now-defunct online music service for college students, Ruckus Network. The Twitter reaction as he spoke included the T-shirt suggestion, and continued:

• it's awesome in the "I don't want to turn away from the accident because I might see a severed head" way
  
• Too bad they took my utensils away w/ my plate. I could have jammed the butter knife into my temple.

Perfect conditions propelled this Twitter torrent: a speaker who delivered what was apparently a technically flawed and topically dated talk to a crowd of Web experts who expected better. They reacted by flaying him with more than 500 tweets in one hour. The onslaught grew so large that it went viral—live. The conference became one of the most popular topics on Twitter, meaning strangers with no connection to the meeting gaped at Mr. Galper's humiliation when they logged onto their home pages. One consultant who coaches academics on public speaking now uses the disaster as a what-to-avoid case study. [More]

I could just raise my fee.

Or be more interesting.

Dept. of Duh!...

Maybe I'm missing something really important here but did we really need a study to prove the railroads made agriculture boom?

During the 1850s, land in U.S. farms surged by more than 100 million acres while almost 50 million acres of land were transformed from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of transforming this land into a productive resource represented a significant fraction of domestic capital formation at the time and was an important contributor to American economic growth. Even more impressive, however, was the fact that almost half of these total net additions to cropland occurred in just seven Midwestern states which comprised barely less than one-eighth of the land area of the country at that time. Using a new GIS-based transportation database linked to county-level census, we estimate that at least a quarter (and possibly two-thirds or more) of this increase can be linked directly to the coming of the railroad to the region. Farmers responded to the shrinking transportation wedge and rising revenue productivity by rapidly expanding the area under cultivation and these changes, in turn, drove rising farm and land values. [More]

In fairness, I did not plunk down $5 for the paper on principle, but just looking at the age of towns in IL for one example, the ones on the IL Central tend to be the oldest.  The railroads also prompted the immigration of millions of Northern Europeans to the Midwest and forever altered its previously Yankee culture.

That influence was by far the more important for America, IMHO.

For all who watch BBT*...

 [More]

*Big Bang Theory

Jump Bach, Jack...

Music on a Mobius strip.



The trouble with true genius is we can't really grasp it.

[via j-walk]

Inequality: not to worry...

In my search for enlightenment on the nature of income inequality, I have run into some innovative and intriguing slants from those who don't see a big problem.  A new one, which has been approved for general consumption by some libertarian thinkers like Will Wilkinson was penned by Scott Winship.

First his conclusion:

It is not immediately clear what to think about income concentration being confined to the very top.  Would it be worse if income were becoming increasingly concentrated in the top half of the distribution at the expense of the bottom half or if it were becoming increasingly concentrated in Bill and Melinda Gates's household at the expense of everyone else?  Does the answer change depending on whether the "losers" are experiencing strong income growth or not?  On some level, as long as incomes are rising for everyone, it matters little how much more the Gates's income is rising.  They cannot price others out of markets for goods and services by themselves.  On the other hand, if the top fifth of the income distribution is pulling away from the bottom 80 percent, then the consequences for those falling behind could be profound.  The top fifth might be able to sort themselves into the best neighborhoods with the best schools, and they might bid up the cost of higher education to the point where the best schools become unaffordable to most families.

The evidence indicates that patterns of inequality more closely resemble the Gates scenario than the bifurcation scenario.  It is unlikely that the rise in inequality, then, has had much practical impact on the quality of life of middle-income or poor Americans.  The exception would be if rising inequality had spawned competitive spending patterns to maintain relative standing in such a way that families end up worse off as a consequence of trying to keep up with the Joneses.  For now, however, this possibility remains largely untested.

Finally, the magnitude of the increase in inequality and its nature might be of little practical importance even as the level of inequality has deleterious effects.  In other words, what may be relevant is that the top ten percent has received at least a third of all income in every year since 1980, not that it increased from a third to nearly half by 2007.  But if that were the case, it would have different implications for American society, politics, and economics than if growing inequality is a trend to be viewed with alarm.  Indeed, we would be in worse trouble if the levels of inequality prior to the run-up of recent decades were as consequential as the level we have today, for we are unlikely to ever see inequality levels so low in the foreseeable future. [More]

As this graph shows, his assertion (I believe) is that income gains are not being hogged by the upper 10%.  They are mostly going to the upper 1%!  

This is viewed - stay with me here - as better, for the reasons he outlines above. Indeed, the casual acceptance of this lopsided economic outcome gives one pause. As Wilkinson puts it,"And what we know is that almost the entire increase in inequality since the 1980s is attributable to a stupendous rise in incomes at the top of the top of the top of the income distribution.".

Added to the argument that since the cost of living for the poor has risen less than the cost of living for the rich (there's no Walmart for Gucci bags, I guess), these assurances seem to skirt one larger problem for me: How the heck do we grow the economy if the vast majority see no real income growth?

I saw Michael Swanson from Wells Fargo put the formula for GDP up in his presentation at The Elite Producers Conference:

GDP = C + I + G + (X-M)

C = consumer spending (72%)
I = Investment   (~10%)
G = Government (~25%)
(X-M) = Net exports (-3%)

Swanson then pointed out the key to growth in his opinion was to increase "I", investment.  OK, I'll buy that, but it's going to be really hard to move GDP much if you don't increase "C" in my thinking. 10% growth in C produces 7% GDP growth; 10% growth in I gets you 1%.

So if income is almost entirely absorbed into folks who aren't going to consume, but just invest, it will be hard to see much economic growth, simply because of the relative importance of the two factors.  This is my issue with growing income inequality.

As the folks in the dairy industry struggled to find ways to increase demand and prices, it seems stagnant income for most Americans will undo their efforts.  With flat income growth, food sellers have to take sales from housing or clothes, etc. to grow.

Maybe there is nothing morally wrong with lopsided income distribution.  Maybe it is ordained by religious adherence to Capitalism as inscribed in Leviticus or the Bill of Rights or somewhere.


But it's not going to help our economy grow.  Humanitarian issues aside, our system won't work if all of us don't see income progress.  This is the real headache for livestock and dairy.  Bill Gates can't eat all the meat and milk he can afford.

In a year where I am cursing my luck...

Maybe I should consider how lucky my species has been.

Instead, moderns were very, very lucky—so lucky that Finlayson calls what happened "survival of the weakest." About 30,000 years ago, the vast forests of Eurasia began to retreat, leaving treeless steppes and tundra and forcing forest animals to disperse over vast distances. Because they evolved in the warm climate of Africa before spreading into Europe, modern humans had a body like marathon runners, adapted to track prey over such distances. But Neanderthals were built like wrestlers. That was great for ambush hunting, which they practiced in the once ubiquitous forests, but a handicap on the steppes, where endurance mattered more. This is the luck part: the open, African type of terrain in which modern humans evolved their less-muscled, more-slender body type "subsequently expanded so greatly" in Europe, writes Finlayson. And that was "pure chance."

Because Neanderthals were not adept at tracking herds on the tundra, they had to retreat with the receding woodlands. They made their last stand where pockets of woodland survived, including in a cave in the Rock of Gibraltar. There, Finlayson and colleagues discovered in 2005, Neanderthals held on at least 2,000 years later than anywhere else before going extinct, victims of bad luck more than any evolutionary failings, let alone any inherent superiority of their successors. [More]

I'm not sure I buy this theory 100%, but I do find as I age gracelessly, the role of sheer chance is much overlooked.  Many work harder and smarter than we do.  Many are more talented and visionary.  But they don't climb to the top.

Worse still, many who do seem unlikely competitors.  This could be a convenient excuse for bad results, but I think it could better prompt us to more correctly allocate credit for our own progress.