Washington Insider -- Monday

By DTN's Washington Insider

Here’s a quick monitor of Washington farm and trade policy issues from DTN’s well-placed observer.

CBO: More Disaster Relief Funds for Congress Next Year

An estimated $14.1 billion will be able to be spent on disaster relief next year by Congress, more than it normally would have because it has spent under a formula limit this year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said.

The agency also estimated that Congress has continued spending under the statutory discretionary caps this year, indicating there will be no need for across-the-board cuts to bring spending down to the legal level. “CBO’s assessment remains unchanged — the discretionary appropriations provided to date for 2015 do not exceed the caps, and thus, by CBO’s estimates, a further sequestration (or cancellation of budgetary resources) will not be required as a result of appropriation actions this year,” the agency said in its annual August sequestration update.

As for disaster relief spending, Congress will have more to spend next year because it has spent below the formula in budget law for this year. Congress can spend $8.7 billion next year based on the adjusted average spent on disaster relief over the past 10 years, plus another $5.4 billion that represents the amount by which this year’s disaster spending fell below that 10-year average. This year, Congress appropriated $6.5 billion for disaster relief — $5.4 billion less than the previous average of disaster spending.

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Sen. Brown Will Block Nomination of Deputy US Trade Rep on TPP Concern

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who did not vote for Trade Promotion (fast-track) Authority, nor expected to vote for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement if and when the Senate gets to vote on it, said he will block the nomination of Marisa Lago to be deputy US trade representative because the Obama administration has not made the text of the pending TPP accessible to policy advisers with appropriate security clearances.

Brown recently told the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) that he would block Lago’s nomination unless the TPP text was made available to cleared policy advisors without those advisors having to be accompanied by a member of Congress.

“The Administration would rather sacrifice a nominee for a key post than improve transparency of the largest trade agreement ever negotiated,” Brown said in a statement. “This deal could affect more than the 40% of our global economy, but even seasoned policy advisors with the requisite security clearance can’t review text without being accompanied by a Member of Congress. It shouldn’t be easier for multinational corporations to get their hands on trade text than for public servants looking out for American workers and American manufacturers.”

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Washington Insider: To Feed Billions More, Better Farming Data

Most people think of the Wall Street Journal as primarily concerned with companies’ profit and loss statements, but it recently commented extensively on the growing importance of ag technology in the world’s future.

The article began with the observation that has become fairly common among futurists—the need to feed some 2 billion more people by the middle of the century. At the same time, farmers will have to produce 70% more calories by 2050 for a wealthier population, and do so on less land and with less water than they do today, according to FAO.

The alternative, the Journal says, is global food crises as there were in 2007-2008.

The article looks past current fights about the sustainability and asserts that “in any scenario, with any mix of ad-hoc solutions to such issues, one fact remains: America’s family farmers, including 97% of America’s 2.1 million farms are going to have to produce a lot more food per acre, on top of a century of productivity gains unprecedented in the history of agriculture.”

The point of the article is the conclusion that “getting more food from every acre without devastating the land for future generations requires two contradictory things at once: Making farms ever larger, since consolidation leads to efficiency, as in any industry, and allowing farmers to understand every single thing happening on their farms, down to a resolution of single days, square meters and even individual plants.”

This covers a surprising range of technologies, the Journal says—and, it notes that many of the “advanced” technologies are already in use.

The world’s largest producer of autonomous four-wheeled vehicles, the Journal says, isn’t Tesla or Google, it’s John Deere. “And the cab of one of these self-driving tractors is now so full of screens and tablets that it has come to resemble the cockpit of a passenger jet.” The comparison is accurate in more ways than one, since perhaps only the airline industry can match farming in the degree to which its vehicles have become automated.

“When you think of John Deere you think of a bunch of mechanical engineers who are designing big steel parts, but we have 2,600 employees who come in every day who are writing software,” John May, chief information officer of John Deere, told the Journal.

The result is that John Deere and its competitors aren’t just turning out tractors, combines and trucks that can drive themselves but they are also turning out wirelessly connected sensors that can map every field, as well as planting and spraying machines that can variably apply seed and nutrients to a field—and, keep up to date on what’ going on inside every engine, at the same time.

What’s new about all this, the Journal says, is that “data-centric companies with Silicon Valley pedigrees” like 2 1/2-year-old Granular and aerial surveillance startup Drone Deploy, increasingly have the ability to tap into all this machinery and run farms as efficiently as Google runs its data centers.

The Journal is fascinated by the examples of technological prowess and cited Sid Gorham, CEO and co-founder of Granular, as suggesting a label—Farming Enterprise Resource Planning software. It says this is “the same kind of software, dominated by the likes of SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, that allows giant corporations to manage their entire supply chains and all their connected parts, including cash flow and human resources.”

The Journal thinks that this is the way we will feed the entire world’s people in the future, and says that will mean “managing every acre of our farmland with the same precision that allows a company like Apple to deliver tens of millions of iPhones within weeks of each other.”

Certainly, there is a wide gap between this view and the outlook of those who see farming as a public utility that can only preserve our “food quality” by banishing technology and fossil fuel use and returning to a vision of agriculture as it never was—an industry that was hostile to both food consumers and producers. Perhaps the greatest danger is the growing gap between those who work in farming and those who write about it and perceive threats in new technologies that scientists say never existed, Washington Insider believes.

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(GH/CZ)

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