That's the USDA proposed National Animal Identification System. Use a chicken, go to jail. ndeed, the only general systems of permanent registration of personal property in the United States are systems administered by the individual states for two items that are highly dangerous if misused: motor vehicles and guns. It is difficult to imagine any acceptable basis for the Department to subject the owner of a chicken to more intrusive surveillance than the owner of a gun. For example, whereas the owner of a long gun generally can take the gun and go hunting beyond the confines of his or her own property without notifying the government, the Department proposes that the chicken owner, under pain of unspecified "enforcement," must report within 24 hours any instance of a chicken leaving or returning to the registered property. (Standards, pp. 13, 18-19, 21; Plan, p. 17.) Even more important than the trammeling of basic property rights under the program is the...

See this PERC essay by Alison Berry about forest management. Federally owned forests in the United States are experiencing ecological and financial problems. Concern about the state of the nation’s public forests has inspired a search for different approaches to the management of logging and other forest-related activities. Th is search has led to Canada, where public forests are managed in ways that are strikingly different from those in the United States. In this essay, “Branching Out: Case Studies in Canadian Forest Management,” Alison Berry presents four case studies from Canada that illustrate the benefits of long-term leases and licenses (oft en called tenures) and decentralized control. The gist of the difference between US management of public lands and Canadian management is that the Canadian national government makes no attempt to actually do the management. That makes sense since 70% of their massive forest lands are owned by the government, a legacy of colonialism when it was all the...

One of the reasons that environmental activists seem to be mean spirited twits spreading disinformation for personal gain is that this is true. They are social predators, entrepreneurs of sorts, who make their way in life exploiting the troubles of others. Their creative energies are squandered in trying to identify some segment of society that has related problems, and then trying to organize them into a rent seeking grievance group. The oblique benefits the social predator gets are jobs in organzations such as NGOs, government offices, political organizations and publications. Consider this twisted article. As bad as the annual flood of cheap corn is for our health -- nutritionally worthless high-fructose corn syrup, cheap feed for confined animals pumped full of antibiotics and hormones -- it may be even worse for the environment. Bolstered by government subsidies that have averaged about $4 billion annually since 1995, U.S. production accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world's corn output. Grain,...

After the Kyoto debacle in Montreal - the world showed no appetite for more bureaucratic Kyoto style wanking - and Blair's change of tack, explicitly recognizing that no nation would hamstring itself to reduce emissions, the climate hysteria industry deflated for a while. More recently a lot of effort has been expended by those with the most to lose if that industry truly collapses. When the eco-apocalypse meets the New Testament apocalypse, you know something is up. That something is a sense of political desperation among climate change alarmists, as the world slowly turns against them. If there is any subject more certain than the federal budget process to bring on eye-glaze, it is global warming and the drearily repetitive argument about the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The issue combines the worst of wonky numerology (parts per million of various gases, complex computer models, opaque cost-benefit analyses), an alphabet soup of unctuous international bureaucracies (IPCC, UNFCCC,...

I've watched in semi-bemused amazement as the bloated federal government created mostly by Democrats in the twentieth century (not liberals, since they are exceedingly illiberal) was captured by their opponents and is now used to further a different flavor of illiberalism. The amazement isn't that this could happen, since it was a certainty that it would happen, but that the Democrats are at least feigning surprise and outrage - and some are truly confused and shocked. For example: The facts alone just don't move people. Why that is would be an excellent subject for sociological study. I'm sure it's complicated. But here's one thought: It is human nature to want -- nay, need -- human enemies. Evil people, who can be demonized. And tortured. And killed. And -- most importantly -- seen. People understand people. That's one reason terrorism has such an iron grip on both domestic and foreign policy, despite the relatively low risk anyone in this country...

Charcoal in other words, but not necessarily made from wood, any organic material will do. A Cornell researcher is begging for funding by touting his work with "so-called bio-char -- similar to charcoal" as a double dip ag practice that improves yield and sequesters carbon in soil as a durable compound that can last for ages. "The knowledge that we can gain from studying the Amazonian dark earths, found throughout the Amazon River region, not only teaches us how to restore degraded soils, triple crop yields and support a wide array of crops in regions with agriculturally poor soils, but also can lead to technologies to sequester carbon in soil and prevent critical changes in world climate," said Johannes Lehmann, assistant professor of biogeochemistry in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell University, speaking today (Feb. 18) at the 2006 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lehmann, who studies bio-char and is the...

From an academic perspective she was raised in a barn by wolves, and so lacks some institutional manners and graces, but some of her insights are treasures. [via Cafe Hayek] However, in the face of so many nasty surprises, arising in so many different circumstances and under so many differing regimes, we must be suspicious that some basic assumption or other is in error, most likely an assumption so much taken for granted that it escapes identification and skepticism. Macro-economic theory does contain such an assumption. It is the idea that national economies are useful and salient entities for understanding how economic life works and what its structure may be: that national economies and not some other entity provide the fundamental data for macro-economic analysis. This assumption is about four centuries old, coming down to us from the early mercantilist economists who happened to be preoccupied with the rivalries of European powers for trade and treasure during the period...

The recent WTO ruling that European discrimination against GMOs violates international trade rules was a surprise to me. I expected they would get away with it. Part of that ruling was the assertion that European discrimination wasn't based on science. Some argue that science isn't the issue, that democracy is the issue. If they want to ban GMOs then that's their choice and the WTO shouldn't force them down their throats. But, this isn't a democracy issue. You don't get to pick and choose which rules you will follow in a democracy, you get to work to change them using democratic processes. Alternatively, you can move to a different location with different rules or, as in this case since it is a world institution, withdraw and pay the price of your convictions. Others argue that though GMO opposition isn't scientific that it is none the less valid in some sense because people are alientated from science and modernity for...

Many people blame science for our surpluses of farm products. They say the trouble is that science taught us how to grow two blades of grass where one grew before. I think the trouble is that that is exactly what science did not teach us. Instead it taught us how to grow something else where two blades of grass grew before. -- Henry A. Wallace, June 21, 1940, Secretary of Agriculture, The Strength and Quietness of Grass Wallace wasn't the only Secretary of Agriculture in the 40s who understood grass and farming. In 1948 Clinton P. Anderson, then Secretary of Agriculture, stressed the need to expand grassland farming, which, he said, is "the foundation of security in agriculture." 1948 Yearbook of Agriculture: Grass has become a cult classic among grass farmers and general farmers who use leys or pastures in their rotations. One of the special projects of The Leopold Center is to reissue that book. The 1948 yearbook...

David Roberts, dark-sider who posts at the Gristmill blog - sometimes seems to almost rise above his biases and activism to reason in good faith. Almost. Bush's SOTU statement that "America is addicted to oil" was treated as the Big News of the speech, as though he'd admitted to some deep dark secret. . . But it strikes me as an extraordinarily poor way of describing the problem. . . The subtext of America being "addicted" is that the American people are somehow fallen and weak. But America does not rely on oil by virtue of any moral failing. It is not a weakness. It's simple prudence: For quite a long time now, oil has been an incredibly cheap, incredibly concentrated source of energy. It turns out that burning it is screwing up our atmosphere, and it's going to run out soonish, and it props up politically detestable regimes, so yeah, we need to start phasing it out. Circumstances...

Manure isn't a useful source of nitrogen for crops. There is a small amount of nitrogen in it, but little of that small amount is in a mineralized, plant available, form. Worse, it is already spoken for by the bacteria that have the job of decomposing the manure - composting it in effect - to recycle it back to soil. Putting manure on your fields reduces available nitrogen and retards plant growth. There is a small net benefit after time has passed and all the workers have done their jobs to release and reform the organic nitrogen, but it is a mistake to equate manure with fertilizer. For example, a typical load of dairy manure - which would have some urine in it and that's where most animal nitrogen is excreted as urea - might give you 10 pounds of nitrogen per ton. A ton of urea fertilizer - same stuff - such as you can buy would give...

Marty Bender, retread naturalist who trained initially in physics and chemistry, has died of cancer way before his time. [via Nature Noted] Bender, who taught himself calculus in junior high school, was naturally made for science. But as a self-described city boy from Dayton, Ohio, he was not a born or bred naturalist. He graduated, cum laude, with a degree in physics and chemistry before developing the interest in biology that would take him to The Land Institute. "I look back," Bender said at the institute's Prairie Festival in 2004, when a nature trail was named for him, "and find it hard to believe that during the first 25 years of my life, the only things I could actually name were robins, blue jays, cardinals, pigeons and nighthawks." I've valued his work in quantifying agricultural energy flows. From the obit: Bender's answers were both blunt and exacting, what institute board Chairman Conn Nugent called a "tough theology": "Will biofuels...

Some wonder why the M.A. landed with a thud. [via Resilience Science blog] When the huge report first emerged last spring after four years, $24 million and the efforts of more than 1,300 scientists in 95 countries, it made headlines elsewhere. In December, it was awarded a Zayed Prize, something like an environmentalist Nobel. Here in North America, though, the media barely registered its existence. What a dirty shame. The U.N.-backed Millennium Assessment is the most thorough survey of global ecosystems ever undertaken. It's also the first report of its kind to link ecosystem health to human well-being, and in so doing, strikes the rich, rich vein of human self-interest. Showing people what's in it for them is a great way to get something done. A first pass answer to the question of why it was largely ignored is that it has the stench of the UN about it, but it isn't as if there wasn't a lot of...

The earlier post Twirling Ethanol claimed that: When you decode the buzz words - bio-fuel, bio-mass, oil-free, foreign oil, etc. - you end up with proposals to revert to an earlier time in history when plants and dung were all the fuel we had. Food was scarce enough that gloomy predictions of impending doom were made while beasts of burden consumed large quantities of crops. For a few decades food production increased greatly while at the same time beasts of burden were replaced by fossil fueled engines. It desn't seem to make sense to have our engines replace beasts as competitors for food even if our technologies are very much more advanced than they were in the past since there are also lots more of us. So how much stuff did those draft animals eat? [via Knowledge Problem] At the turn of the last century, America's transportation system was fueled by biomass: 30 million horses and mules, give or...