posted
being lazy here, but this article is dead on IMO September 12, 2012
Midwestern farmers, facing uncertainty about their crops in the midst of the worst drought in half a century, have something else to steam about: Congress' failure to pass a new farm bill, even though the old one is slated to expire Sept. 30. That may not sound so bad, because farm bills are invariably bloated with market-distorting corporate welfare for agribusiness that we'd be better off without. Yet they also fund the federal food stamp program, one of the most important strands of the U.S. safety net.
The Senate passed a version of the farm bill in June that cut spending on food stamps by a modest $4.5 billion over 10 years and trimmed overall spending by $23 billion during that period by eliminating direct payments to farmers, which are awarded whether or not they plant anything. That was a welcome change in an otherwise business-as-usual bill, which retained among other things the complex system of price controls and import quotas that force Americans to pay up to twice the global market price for sugar. Meanwhile, the Senate gave a new handout to farmers in the form of added subsidies for crop insurance.
For all that, the Senate bill is a wonder of progress compared with the version that passed through the House Agriculture Committee, which contained most of the Senate's provisions but would have saved an additional $16.5 billion over a decade by trimming food stamps. The bill never made it to the House floor, but that wasn't because of its stinginess; "tea party" Republicans didn't think the cuts went far enough.
posted
keep in mind as your read this that every cut to food stamps and cuts to farmers decreases our GDP, becuse GDP counts those too...
i am all for getting rid of almost all of this crap.
when i pay for my food? i am paying for it with money i earned. Food stamps keep prices artificially high..
who does that REALLY BENEFIT? not me...
glassman
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so the local news is covering the harvest this year as bumper crop.
i get and read the weekly MS crop extension newsletter (Miss Satate U) so i'm not surprised, we had good year for weed control and the bugs have not been too bad. the new seeds that are drought resistant from Monsanto have performed as advertised, so everyobidy is happy right? wrong..
this is my gripe with growers and producers- no matter how good everything goes? they always have something to beach about.. like sailors
right now they are complaining about the low river levels and having to store their grain...
local reports are that they have their grain bins full and are running out of storage and the barges are running at half capacity for the low draft on the river...
this is a great example of how screwed up our whole "dirt to table" food processes really are. why are these guys running out of storage for their own product? cuz they didn't invest in the infrastructure they NEED to have (which creates jobs BTW). The big outfits like Cargill have the whole system tied up for themselves... when i lived in NE? the old-timers who still had the family farm (and more ) after 125 years were all into buying and storing their neighbors grain too...those guys were the ones raking in the bucks and they usually have feed lot right up the road for their excess too today? i could not even buy into the farm biz if wanted to ( i don't) because of the way the infrastructure is controlled by a few big agrobizzes...
The Bigfoot
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Of course it doesn't benefit you glass. If it did you wouldn't be paying for it. Or, at least, you would be paying a dollar for every buck twenty-five you got back like good ol MS.
It's part of the responsibilities of living in a stable community where those with the least receive the most help. That is functional government.
It could be done much better I agree, especially the farm bill's corporate gifts. Fixing this just doesn't have enough priority.
Think of government as a water tank with a ten thousand different holes of various sizes and our elected leaders the ones standing around it trying to fix it. If one particular leak happens to fall on the land of family or close friends of course that particular man is going to be more motivated to close off other leaks first.
You can try to make a leak proof system if you want but it won't be a year before someone pokes a new hole in it. Ask the followers of Marx about that.
In my opinion the main problem in our country is that the parties and the major donors are too solidified. Too many of our reps have the same friends. Break that apart and two things happen. First, compromise will once again become absolutely necessary in order to get anything accomplished. Second, certain larger holes that are currently being ignored will lose the protection of group led ignorance.
glassman
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i'm all for feeding the hungry, i'm really concerned about how much of our subsidization has gone to corporate entities. Like the Grocery chain and walmart that take the food stamps. never mind the huge corporate farms as opposed to family corporate farms- i know the difference twixt them.. family farms can be successfully transferred to heirs without significant losses thru a corporate tool...
they would not be able to charge as much as they do right here in this county without those stamp programs.. people look right past this fact when they complain about dhe poor people draining our resources.
the other issue is that susbsistence farming by poor people is dead here because they get food stamps now. i don't want to see people living off the land, but at the same time, they are not raising gardens like they did 50 years ago... heck i "play" at gardening and raising chickens. i know that. i make my kids participate so's they apreciate what is really going into the food they eat, but having to live off it would be scary to me cuz i know my own limitations... but people who must have food stamps are not growing any food now either. thye have the land to do it here, this ain't urban....
T e x
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Here's my deal--and, I concede, I'm so angry that I'm about to burst into flame--a big chunk of my "retirement" has been based on the idea of a-little-better-than-subsistence-farming: given adequate land and water, I can raise enough food to supply my family and sell some to neighbors. An integral part of my model is free (or very cheap manure), preferably horse manure, for reasons I won't go into here. Suffice it to say that for generations we in this part of the country have not had to pay for petro-based for fertilizers for home-based gardens.
Toward that end, I've begun building my new raised beds for the new place where I'm living, and on Sunday Tex, Jr. and I picked up a nice-size trailer-load of horse manure. After discussion and a little research, we had decided we would compost it at least three months in order to cook off any worm medicine (I don't blame horse owners for regular working--I would, too.)
Well, upon further research, before actually installing the chit in my new beds, I dug a lil deeper, and...guess what?
Dow makes some hellified, hormone-based POISON that *could* render my compost unuseable and dangerous to anything I plant--except maybe CORN--for the next 2 to 3 years.
I now have a *bunch* of links about this (apparently folks in the UK made a bigger stink than we have here), but here's a starter link for anybody who's interested:
I tell you what...these chemical sumbeyotches are bound and GD-determined to have us all living offa dam IV, chemistry drip...
glassman
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that one is pretty serious...
how much have you got? are you overloaded with it or is something you can just haul off (i dunno where is an honest and safe palce to dispose of it).
if you are stuck with it? i want you to try something.
Based on data from environmental fate studies, clopyralid is not persistent in the natural environment and breaks down readily in soil (average half-life, about 25 days). Similar studies suggest that it does not break down as readily in compost. Research is underway to find out why this is the case and what conditions accelerate its breakdown in compost.
try taking a sample area and spreading it out thin to get full sunshine for 30 days...
that would be my first look fixing this..UVA&B damages alot of chemicals sunlight is one issue that makes compost unlike other "natural" stuff... when you compost, you are usually closing off most airflow and most all sunlight...
IF this stuff is that persistent in compoost only like they say? we can solve this... it might be worht some real money to whoever solves it...
T e x
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There's three compounds, related.
No, I'm not stuck--but I coulda been, up to 3 years; haven't performed the "bio-assay" test, yet. Just found this, last night.
I *do* have a load, on a tandem-axle trailer...
Early research says "300 days' " half-life.
CashCowMoo
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Anyone familiar with crop dusting? Are they still using some bad stuff in all that?
glassman
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cash i have a crop duster over my house just about every morning the weather is fair at 6:30 AM...
now it's cotton picking season... they have to defoliate the plants before they can pick the bolls...
you ever hear of agent orange? that's a defoliant...
they'll be spraying 12.6 million acres with defoliant in MS alone this year... almost all by crop duster...
there's so many differnt ones it's not possible to know what you are getting hit with...
the application rates are around 20 gallons per acre -mist...
some of them are worse than others, but after they drop all the leaves? the pickers will get all the cotton and then they'll burn the fields in huge fires... the smoke? full of everything that they've been spraying all year...
much of it does decay before they burn it, but not the defoliants- they are usually only a month old when they burn.. we all get all kinds of congestion and allergies here from it.. the migraines? it's an epidemic here this time of year.. i know people who have to get demerol shots for them regularly... not me, i'm pretty lucky about this one, i can usually get by with zyrtec...
12.6 million acres with about 20 gallons per acre... you do the math... i've got acres in cotton on every side of me within one half mile and some only across the bayou- 25 feet...
when i lived in VA? i had a colony of a dozen canaries.. i don't think they'd make it here even if there was a market for such exotic pets, there ain't...
CashCowMoo
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that is messed up!
glassman
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quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: that is messed up!
well, it's how agrbiz works... i don't like it, but they get the food made here, and it feeds alot of people... we continuously look for profitable alternatives.
cotton is not a food crop and they have differnt rules and regs for food and non-food crops.. timberland? you'd be surprised how much forestland is sprayed wiht heavy duty stuff cuz it ain't food...
i do wonder how they rotate thru the food crops after they have sprayed for cotton the year before.. for instnace? i dunno whether the corn here is only for ehtanol or not.. if they have special rules for ethanol corn versus feed or food corn? can they rotate it thru the cotton feilds? i'll have to look that one up tomorrow hto, been a long day here...
glassman
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quote:Originally posted by CashCowMoo: that is messed up!
one other thing about this issue cash. all these flying tractors are 'efficient" but hey actually redice jobs by allowing one flyer and his ground support of maybe four fulltimers do theworkf dozens of people who ware now on welfare here. it really is that simple...
progress is progress, i ain't aginit. there's just a real price for every decision we make.
on the other end of this? we have hundreds of truly dedicated very smart people working their butts off solving each and every problem.. in theory anyway.. the reality is that alot of them are not working at all, and i am about to lay waste personally to a half dozen of the creeps. Point being that we have to test and evaluate all these new chemicals to force them to replace the one that they know are screwing us all up. so "they" invent new chit use it for 4 years until the smarter analysts can prove it's a poison, then they are already prepared to drop the old chit and spray something with a single piece of molecule changed and wait for the analysts to prove that is also a poison so we start over again.. getting the drift here?
we do not need LESS regulation in most of this, we need SMARTER regulations, we need more people in the inventing side to be way smarter, but there is reason they can't get 'em on that side and it is cuz the pay is less for the actual researcher and higher (like 100 times) higher for the "investors" and the CEO's who want just another 5 year wonder that they can then replace again when the data finally comes in...
as to killing the bugs and weeds there's another wildcard in there. and that is the survival of the fittest rule... remember the survivors are not the smartest or the brightest, they are the ones that most easily and quickly adapt... you don't need brains to adapt, you need something called a transposable element (genetics) that can move your genes around-- how did we get several hundred dog varieties from the wolf? they must have these "jumping genes" or something like them. hence they get the free ride form US humans because we convince ourselves we can make them into what we want them to be - but in reality, they adapt to US very quickly and we trick ourselves into thinking we did it.. who loses in that? the real Wolves who cannot adapt like their (less 'powerful') brothers the dog.. we go into the deep space? and we'll start adapting again instead of US tricking ourselves into thinking we are better cuz we change our environment...
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