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Farmland prices soar — along with farm debt
Farmland prices soar — along with farm debt
While small-scale producers of fruits and vegetables are scraping by, it’s a whole ‘nother story for corn and soy farmers. (It’s always a whole ‘nother story for corn and soy farmers, really.) Well-oiled subsidies, overseas demand, ethanol like whoa, plus a drop in production thanks to the drought are all pushing crop prices up — and, in turn, prices for the land those crops are grown on.
The New York Times reports on the gleeful farmers, speculating investors, and impending economic doom.
Across the American heartland, farmland prices are soaring. In places like Waco, Neb., and Chickasaw County, Iowa, where the boom-and-bust cycle of farming reaches deep into the psyche, some families are selling the land that they have worked for generations, to cash in while they can. …
Sensing opportunity, investment firms are buying, too. David Taylor, of Oskaloosa, Kan., said he was saddened to sell his family’s farm but that the prices were too good to resist. …
“I bawled like a baby,” Mr. Taylor, 59, said. His crop-producing fields sold for $10,100 an acre.
In Iowa, despite the drought last year, farmland prices have nearly doubled since 2009, to an average $8,296 an acre, far surpassing the last boom’s peak in 1979. In Nebraska, the price of irrigated land has also doubled since 2009.
That’s given farmers who’ve chosen to stay a whole lot of value to borrow against, and borrow they are. Farmers’ debt load has risen almost a third since 2007.
Regulators say it is difficult to determine exactly how much farm debt exists, because much of it involves debt owed to various vendors and suppliers.
“In so many ways, we’re blind to some of that information,” said Jason Henderson, a vice president at the Omaha branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
What banksters aren’t blind to is the potential for profit. More investors, including foreign banks, are moving in to snap up high-priced land and rent it back to farmers. The whole dynamic smacks of a bubble — one that deserves to pop, but that will make a big mess for the folks invested in it.
“There are some opportunities out there, but man, it’s tough,” said Shonda Warner, a former Goldman Sachs trader who returned to her Midwest farm roots in 2006, when she started Chess Ag Full Harvest Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in farmland. Like many other investors, Ms. Warner’s fund buys land and then rents it to farmers. As land prices have risen sharply, so have rents.
“I worry about people who are buying farmland and expecting to get big rents, $500 or even $600 in the Midwest,” Ms. Warner said. “What happens when corn prices fall next year and they can’t pay? What are you going to do? Take their television set?”
Uh, yeah, Warner, that’s exactly what the debt collectors will do. And then, ironically, those now TV-less ex-farmers will only be able to afford cheap processed foods and meat from animals fed corn and soy. Oh, I almost forgot: Happy National Agriculture Day!
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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Kitchen Composting Works for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner
One of the largest contributors to home-based composting piles is kitchen waste. Scraps from meal preparations as well as cooking supplies can be added to a compost bin and, in turn, contribute to your soil and mulch.
Composting guides generally sort matter into two categories, according to what they contribute to the process; green (nitrogen) and brown (carbon).
A lot of kitchen items are perfect for your pile. Here are just some of the more prevalent compostables from each meal of the day. To view the rest of this list, visit Plantea.com.
Photo: Earth911
Breakfast
Apple cores
Banana peels
Burned toast
Coffee grounds
Date pits
Egg shells
Grapefruit rinds
Oatmeal (cooked or raw)
Outdated yogurt
Stale or soggy breakfast cereal
Sunday comics
Tea bags and grounds
Soy milk
Watermelon rinds
Related: Fight Waste, Revive Stale Food with These Tricks
Lunch
Brown paper bags
Chocolate cookies
Freezer-burned fruit
Fruit salad
Peanut butter sandwiches
Peanut and other nut shells
Pickles
Popcorn
Pumpkin seeds
Stale potato chips
Read: 5 Ways to Pack a Zero Waste Lunch
Photo: Alexandra Vietti, Earth911
Dinner
Artichoke leaves
Cooked rice
Corncobs
Fish scraps, such as shrimp shells, crab shells and lobster shells
Freezer-burned vegetables
Jell-o
Old pasta
Olive pits
Onion skins
Pie crust
Potato peelings
Produce trimmings
Rhubarb stems
Seaweed and kelp
Spoiled canned fruits and vegetables
Stale bread and bread crusts
Tofu
Tossed salad
Supplies
Cardboard cereal boxes
Expired flower arrangements
Grocery receipts
Shredded cardboard
Matches (paper or wood)
Old spices
Paper napkins
Paper towels
Shredded newspapers
Wood chips and ashes
Wooden toothpicks
10 Things in Your Kitchen You Didn’t Know You Could Reuse or Recycle
Nate Lipka
Managing Editor
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Climate change means more blizzards but less snow, which confuses people apparently
Climate change means more blizzards but less snow, which confuses people apparently
Watching the news last night, Diane Sawyer leaned into the camera with a what’ll-they-think-of-next expression on her face to introduce a story straight out of Ripley’s: Climate change may mean less snowfall but more blizzards. [record scratch sound effect] Say whaaaaat?
Philly.com ran the story with the headline, “Less snow, more blizzards makes sense to scientists.” Outlets that ran the Associated Press’ story used, “Climate contradiction: Less snow, more blizzards.” Now I’m not the smartest person in the world, I’ll grant you that, but I find it hard to believe that adult human beings who understand English and have experienced weather are having trouble with this concept.
A blizzard in Manhattan, if that makes sense.
The AP explains the idea:
A warmer atmosphere can hold, and dump, more moisture, snow experts say. And two soon-to-be-published studies demonstrate how there can be more giant blizzards yet less snow overall each year. Projections are that that’s likely to continue with manmade global warming. …
Ten climate scientists say the idea of less snow and more blizzards makes sense: A warmer world is likely to decrease the overall amount of snow falling each year and shrink the snow season. But when it is cold enough for a snowstorm to hit, the slightly warmer air is often carrying more moisture, producing potentially historic blizzards.
“Strong snowstorms thrive on the ragged edge of temperature — warm enough for the air to hold lots of moisture, meaning lots of precipitation, but just cold enough for it to fall as snow,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “Increasingly, it seems that we’re on that ragged edge.”
Even beyond consideration of the “ragged edge” of weather conditions, the concept is not that complex. Consider last year’s drought. It was still a drought even if there was a thunderstorm on the Great Plains one day. Or consider, you know, your life experience. If your boss suggested that he would cut your pay in half but double the number of bonuses you receive — you wouldn’t be happy about that, but the mechanics of the proposal make sense to you. And you probably understand how that would result in your having less money over the long-term.
There are three reasons the story has been covered as it has, I suspect. The first is that there are probably people who don’t really understand the difference between a blizzard and a snowstorm. That’s fine.
The second is that playing up the contradiction is a hook for the media, a tease for readers and viewers who should actually be insulted at being patronized. Given how little coverage of climate change there has been over the past few years, it makes sense that people might need a bit of a ramp into a story about a specific component of the issue. But offering it as a “what’ll those wacky scientists think of next!” sort of story does a disservice to the scientists and the viewers and the media outlet. Two of those parties deserve better.
And the third reason it’s been covered like this: That’s how climate change deniers want it. Conservative websites ran far deeper with the apparent contradiction than the obvious science, as they do. Part of their tacit mission is, of course, to undermine climate science and scientists across the board. So they seized on a variant on the it’s-cold-so-what-about-global-warming response: It’s snowing, so what about that idea of less snow? Which is what makes Diane Sawyer’s aw-shucks treatment of the story so frustrating. It suggests that the concept is confusing — as well as the science. Adults can handle complexity, but they have real trouble with obfuscation.
After the climate story, Sawyer then reported on the hacking of Burger King’s Twitter account. That story didn’t faze Sawyer at all.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Climate change means more blizzards but less snow, which confuses people apparently
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Walmart bribed its way around Mexico’s environmental rules
Walmart bribed its way around Mexico’s environmental rules
BREAKING: Walmart did another terrible thing!
The retail giant is not just the biggest employer in the U.S. — it also dominates Mexico with 2,275 outlets. And it got there by playing very, very dirty. According to the second part of a New York Times investigation, Walmart de Mexico routinely bribed officials not just to get its plans bumped to the top of the pile, but to “subvert democratic governance.” This is how the company successfully built a Walmart in a Teotihuacán alfalfa field a mile from ancient pyramids that draw tons of tourists. (Now those tourists get a view of a boxy Walmart supercenter when they climb to the top.) The local leaders said no, so Walmart de Mexico paid a guy $52,000 and redrew the zoning map itself.
Frankly, this is not very surprising. But it’s damning as hell. From the Times:
Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000, for example, Wal-Mart built a Sam’s Club in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit. Thanks to nine bribe payments totaling $765,000, Wal-Mart built a vast refrigerated distribution center in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away.
But there is no better example of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s methods than its conquest of Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field. In Teotihuacán, The Times found that Wal-Mart de Mexico executives approved at least four different bribe payments — more than $200,000 in all — to build just a medium-size supermarket. Without those payoffs, records and interviews show, Wal-Mart almost surely would not have been allowed to build in Mrs. Pineda’s field.
The Times seems eager to point out that this is a Walmart problem, not a Mexico problem. These bribes were not, as Reuters puts it, “routine payments.” Except that in effect they actually were.
Walmart now says it’s all kinds of ready “to fully cooperate with the competent authorities in whatever investigation,” Fox helpfully reports (even though the company abandoned its own internal investigation years ago). Perhaps this is because it could be facing “sizable fines.”
This is both vindicating and infuriating, like most times Walmart gets caught doing something terrible. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice might be investigating, but they aren’t commenting on the story, at least not yet. Meanwhile, shares of Walmart’s stock rose 30 cents today.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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Energy prices are the most volatile prices in the country
Energy prices are the most volatile prices in the country
This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its updates to the Consumer Price Index. Or, if you prefer English, here’s how prices for various things have changed over the course of the year.
Prices for consumer products rose 1.8 percent over the last 12 months. This continues to be under the 2011 average inflation rate of 3.2 percent. So that’s good! Here’s how individual consumer products performed, year-over-year change, in percentage:
This is really the picture of the American economy. That bar that drops far below the midline? That’s “piped gas” — in other words, natural gas. To the far right, the highest increase was in medical services. Sounds about right.
Different categories performed differently over the past six months. Here’s a comparison of all items with categories: food, energy, and everything else.
Energy prices were far more volatile than other prices. That category is broken into various subcategories as noted above.
Gasoline is the most volatile of the volatile category — but this shouldn’t surprise you either. Here’s how gasoline has performed in price per gallon nationally over the last six months.
It’s also interesting to note how much less volatile food prices were, given the drought. Prices went up 10 percent in July — but that was globally. Within the United States, both for dining out and at home, prices were pretty flat. (Notice the scale on the left axis below; price changes were only about a quarter of a percent.)
Consider this the government’s year in review (though that will really come when December’s data is released in January). The story it tells is the one we’ve been telling all year: The biggest shifts in our economy are due to changes in our energy use.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Huge, unusual storm slams into Philippines because that is what happens all the time now
Huge, unusual storm slams into Philippines because that is what happens all the time now
This is Typhoon Bopha, as seen from the International Space Station.
Click to embiggen.
That’s what it looks like from space. It’s hard to get a sense of scale from that image, so here’s another, showing it against the arc of the Earth. It extends for more than 300 miles in diameter.
More importantly, here’s what it looks like from the ground.
The storm, which Capital Weather Gang refers to as a “beastly super typhoon,” made landfall as the equivalent of a category 5 storm. The site explains why this storm is unusual.
The relatively compact storm is tracking at an unusually far south latitude, not far from the equator. Writes Wunderground’s Jeff Masters:
“Mindanao rarely gets hit by typhoons, since the island is too close to the Equator, and the infrastructure of Mindanao is not prepared to handle heavy typhoon rains as well as the more typhoon-prone northern islands. Bopha is potentially a catastrophic storm for Mindanao.” …
Storms this strong do not usually occur this far south because the coriolis force, which helps storms spin up, is weak at such latitudes. Bopha became a typhoon just 3.8 degrees above the equator, says the UK Met Office.
Yahoo News describes its passage over the island earlier today.
About 40 people were killed or missing in flash floods and landslides near a mining area on Mindanao, ABS-CBN television reported, saying waters and soil had swept through an army post.
A television reporter said she saw numerous bodies lined up near the army base. A military spokesman earlier said about 20 people, including six soldiers, were missing. …
But the relatively low death toll was due in part to an early evacuation. More than 155,000 people were in shelters late on Tuesday.
The storm has moved into the South China Sea, where it is expected to weaken.
This story is part of Grist’s on-going series “Massive, unusual, deadly storms from around the globe.” The odds are good that the series will eventually become a daily feature. Maybe hourly.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Huge, unusual storm slams into Philippines because that is what happens all the time now
