Tom Vilsack

Using less fertilizer has no meaningful effect on yield

Speaking of limiting the use of synthetic fertilizer, allow me to throw a little science your way courtesy of Science Daily and the USDA's Argriculural Research Service:

From 1998 to 2008, the researchers evaluated and compared potential management strategies for reducing nitrogen and nitrate nitrogen levels in soil and groundwater.

The first study showed that onions used only about 12 to 15 percent of the fertilizer nitrogen applied to the crop. Much of the remainder stayed in the top six feet of soil. The next year, Halvorson and his colleagues planted corn on the same land and found that it recovered about 24 percent of the fertilizer nitrogen that had been applied to the onion crop.

Following that study, the scientists grew alfalfa on the land for five years, then followed it with a watermelon crop, followed by a corn crop. In the first year that the corn was grown, an unfertilized control plot yielded about 250 bushels of corn.

By comparison, a plot fertilized with 250 pounds of nitrogen per acre yielded about 260 bushels, a small increase that required a significantly higher investment of time and money. Additional corn studies following onion in rotation showed corn was a good residual nitrogen scavenger crop.

Is a payment cut real reform or just tweaking with the numbers?

Tom Vilsack has certainly got farm-state legislators talking. The buzz generated by the Obama administration's proposal to cut "direct payments" to farmers continues to grow. Unfortunately, all the sturm and drang may be for naught. And not necessarily because the cut to this particular agricultural subsidy will fail, but because it's not really reform.

The original budget language certainly seemed promising as it linked the cut in government subsidies to a new market in "ecological services." Farmers could use this new revenue to offset the losses from the subsidy cut (and would also have a new incentive to farm more sustainably). But based on recent comments from Vilsack, that whole angle seems to have gone out the window. Instead, Vilsack appears to have decided that the best course of action is to pit farmers against hungry kids. According to Reuters:

U.S. lawmakers will need to choose between supporting rich farmers or feeding more hungry children amid a slumping economy and a surging deficit, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Monday.

Vilsack said he already has heard concerns about the Obama administration's plan to redirect subsidy payments for large farmers into nutrition programs as a way to help end hunger by 2015 and stem the rising tide of childhood obesity.

"We will do our best to frame this discussion in that way, so that people understand: 30 million children, 90,000 farmers," Vilsack told Reuters after speaking to people who work with the nation's food banks and anti-poverty groups.

"It is a tough choice, but it's a choice that folks are going to have to make," he said.

Leave aside the fact that the middle of a severe recession isn't the time to start getting stingy. More importantly, I didn't see anything in the budget that suggested the subsidy savings would go to nutrition -- the stated rationale for the cut was environmental. And it's surprising that Vilsack would go there in the first place. It's no accident that anti-hunger programs are legislated within the Farm Bill -- the better to balance demands from farm state and urban representatives. It's true that, as food writer Michael Pollan has long observed, this marriage of convenience helps perpetuate subsidies. But it's not at all clear that explicitly pitting farmers against hungry children is the way to go.

While a cage match between 30 million children and 90,000 farmers would certainly meet the Hobbsian ideal (nasty, brutish, and short), the legislative process isn't about whose side enjoys a numerical advantage. The only measures of consequence in Congress are the size, strength, and acumen of your lobbying team -- and in that area Big Ag is hard to beat.

The president's budget hints at a coming battle over one kind of ag subsidy

When President Barack Obama said during his recent address to Congress that "in this budget, we will... end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them," he set off a firestorm of speculation. Now that the budget outline has been published, we finally have an understanding of what he meant. Yes, as we suspected, he was indeed referring to a specific subsidy program called "direct payments." Jill Richardson explains:

Direct payments are a result of the 1996 farm bill. Prior to that, subsidies were given based on need. If you couldn't sell your crops at a price the government thought was fair, you got a subsidy to make up the difference...

If you own land where commodities were grown (by you or someone else) in the past, you get a direct payment whether you grow anything or not. You could do nothing, potentially, and still receive a direct payment. Does that sound stupid? I think so too.

Your direct payment is calculated on your "base acres." They keep a running average of how much you grew on your land (or how much somebody grew on your land if it wasn't you), and that yield determines how much you get in government cash. During the past farm bill debate, grain prices were high and farmers were doing well, but the direct payments kept flowing in.

Meanwhile, the budget language looks like this [PDF]:

As part of an effort to transition large farms from direct payments provided to owners of base acres to increased income from revenue derived from emerging markets for environmental services, the President's Budget phases out direct payments over three years to farmers with sales revenue of more than $500,000 annually... Large farmers are well positioned to replace those payments with alternate sources of income from emerging markets for environmental services, such as carbon sequestration, renewable energy production, and providing clean air, clean water, and wildlife habitat.

USDA's People's Garden may not be all it's cracked up to be

US Department of Agriculture chief Tom Vilsack may not deserve that recently awarded Grist green thumbs-up after all. Obamafoodorama (blissfully abbreviated as ObFo) has an amusing and edifying (and lengthy) disquisition on Tom Vilsack's much ballyhooed "People's Garden." When Vilsack took a jackhammer to a slab of concrete in front of USDA headquarters in honor of Lincoln's Birthday (the USDA was founded under Lincoln and referred to by him as "the People's Department"), he thought he was demonstrating the USDA's commitment to sustainable landscaping. But he did it without, it appears, much forethought.

The planning process seems to have consisted of one step: "Dig a hole." There's no design for an actual garden to go in its place -- and it certainly was not intended, as many have presumed and now demanded, to be a food garden. The landscape plan that Vilsack brandished in a USDA photo was, according to USDA/Natural Resources Conservation Service spokesman Terry Bish, a prop. When ObFo asked about it, Bish said "Oh, that's old. Those are the plans from when [former Ag] Secretary Schafer was planting a tree in the ornamental garden to honor a USDA employee who was killed in Iraq."

In fact, the whole thing was a photo op that got out of hand.

But the goal of the garden changed when it became apparent that there was a groundswell of public interest in a food garden at USDA headquarters.

"Suddenly there was all this interest from the public about vegetables," Mr. Bish said. "It was a sleeper. Sometimes we do these things, and they get really big." He repeated: "There's actually no timeline for the garden. It was all about the Bicentennial. But now we have to come up with ways of maintaining it and to see how we can use it ..."

Our weekly look at the heroes and villains of the climate fight

Climate kudos this week go to House and Senate negotiators for cutting out billions of dollars in pork for coal and nuclear from the economic stimulus bill, while managing to protect most of the funding for good, green projects. For once, the legislative sausage-making process did not utterly disappoint.

We'd also like to give a shout-out this week to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for shelving the Bush administration's plan to poke drill bits into every available orifice. Now that's change we Ken believe in!

A third green thumbs-up goes to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack for inaugurating the People's Garden on a plot of pavement at USDA headquarters this week, and announcing his goal of creating community gardens at every USDA facility. The gardens are going to "promote 'going green' concepts" like landscaping and building design to retain water, roof gardens for energy efficiency, native plantings, and conservation practices. You're kinda growing on us, Tom ...

... but you've still got some work to do. Vilsack also gets the finger for pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to require more ethanol in gasoline, just as a coalition of environmental groups unveiled a report detailing how the U.S. biofuel program "exacerbates global warming."

Another big honking finger goes to Dick Saslaw, the majority leader of the Virginia state Senate. Saslaw, a Democrat, this week cast the tie-breaking vote against a bill that would have required utilities to invest in energy-efficiency measures. The legislation would have saved Virginians up to $15 billion on their electric bills by the year 2025 and created thousands of jobs in the process, supporters said. Shocker: Saslaw has received $85,000 in campaign contributions from the coal-huggers at Dominion Power since 2004, more than any other legislator.

Got your own thoughts on who should get the climate finger this week? Put 'em in the comments section below.

Vilsack continues to lay the groundwork for reform

There was some curiosity as to what stance U.S. Department of Agriculture chief Tom Vilsack would take in his speech this week before the National Association of Wheat Growers. Surprisingly, he came as the bearer of bad tidings. According to this report:

Vilsack called on farmers to accept the political reality that U.S. farm program direct payments are under fire both at home and abroad and therefore farmers should develop other sources of income. In his remarks to the groups he said he intends to promote a far more diversified income base for the farm sector, saying that windmills and biofuels should definitely be part of the income mix and that organic agriculture will also play an increasing role.

Um, what? Leave aside the "prepare for a pay cut" thing for a moment. Did Vilsack just use the O-word in front of a bunch of large-scale industrial farmers? Once they stopped laughing, I wonder if they starting thinking about the implications of what he was saying. Maybe this guy is for real.

Vilsack's comments certainly jibe with his plans for the new USDA Office for Ecosystem Services and Markets -- an entity that is charged with cataloging the climate impacts of forestry and farming practices. The Christian Science Monitor characterized it thusly:

The players: Obama’s people

Obama’s green team Joe Romm says, “I honestly don’t know if it is politically possible to preserve a livable climate — but if it is, these are the people to make it happen.” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but Obama has certainly put together a team capable of great things. Coordinating is […]

It's official: Nutrition will play a big role in reform at the USDA

After reading Tom Philpott's post on Tom Vilsack's recent comments to the WaPo, I think it's worth digging in a bit more.

To this point, we've all had to be content with reading tea leaves and parsing statements. But now we are finally getting a taste of the tea. Philpott highlighted Vilsack's line about his desire to represent the interests of those "who consume food" -- a long-awaited distinction to be sure.

Of course, claiming to represent eaters is no panacea. The USDA can easily describe its efforts to support a system that provides vast amounts of cheap calories as "helpful" to consumers -- and that kind of disingenuous wordplay would be par for the course at the old USDA. But it appears that Vilsack takes a broader, more progressive view as he pointed out the following:

His first official act was the reinstatement of $3.2 million in grant funding for fruit and vegetable farmers that had been rescinded in the final days of the Bush administration. Though the dollar amount was small, Vilsack said it sent a message of his emphasis on nutritious food.

True agricultural policy reform may require climate reform first

I'm becoming more and more convinced every day that addressing climate change and reforming food production are pretty much the same thing. You can't do one without the other. And -- as Yogi Berra might say -- vice versa. The food and agriculture industries, aided and abetted by governments worldwide (not to mention by consumers), have succeeded in offloading just about all external costs involved with feeding us. Environmental issues, public health issues, natural resource utilization issues, even most economic issues related to food have all been socialized to the extent that the industry is almost totally isolated from the societal consequences of its actions.

Until now, few have complained, as this system has led to ever lower food prices in the developed world and thriving export markets in the developing world. But the costs, which for 60 years or so seemed to have been pushed back beyond the horizon, are beginning to loom.

Many of us have high hopes that the new administration can make serious progress on reform, but it's important to focus on how serious the challenge before us actually is. In this way, it's like the global warming debate back in the '90s. The science was pretty clear even then. There were visionaries like NASA's James Hansen and, yes, Al Gore, who understood that we needed to act. But for most Americans, hearing about climate change in the '90s was like being reminded to carry an umbrella on a sunny day. Where exactly were the portents of doom?