Milton Friedman once said, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” and the Government Accountability Office is proving this to be true. The GAO is reporting the federal government last year spent $100 Billion in food assistance programs. Giving people money to get food is now a big Continue reading →
This past winter there was a measle outbreak in California and it spread to a few states. Judging from social media and news, you would have thought an asteroid was about to hit the earth. Continue reading →
Sometimes you have to wonder what goes on in marketing board rooms…..via New York Daily News and read whole story here.
Via Indiana Economic Digest –
Elliott Farm sells at $16,200 per acre
Elliott Farm, located near Poseyville, recently sold its 69 acres at auction for $16,200 per acre, or $1,117,800 in total.The farm had been held by the Elliott Family since the early 1940s and was purchased by a local farmer who was represented by proxy. According to auctioneer Andrew Wilson, the price per acre is a record for this area
Back in November I posted a write up called “Visual of the Federal Government School Lunch Mandate”. I received A LOT of negative comments from people saying I didn’t know how the school lunch process works. One person even claimed I was a liar and I challenged that person to eat what the school lunch program suggested. Person hasn’t talked to me since. Problem with some people today is they don’t grasp how fast social media can tell the truth. A picture can be sent out and in the matter of minutes the entire U.S. can view it.
Now another picture has been sent out of what a lunch looks like under the federal government mandate. It’s not pretty. You can read the whole article here at EagNews.org. I’ll give you a brief snippet:
Nah, your eyes are playing tricks on you.
That’s what administrators at Virginia’s Portsmouth Public Schools want parents to believe after a mother took a photo of her child’s paltry school lunch and posted it on social media.
The mom says James Hurst Elementary served the lunch Tuesday.
After the photo began circulating around the community, Food Service Coordinator Jim Gehlhoff admitted the lunch “concerns us,” but added that it might not actually be as bad as it looks.
portsmouth-lunch“Poor lighting and food presentation make this lunch unappealing,” he said in a statement released to the media.
Lauren Cooley over at TurningPointUSA.net found a celebration on social media of people using food stamps i.e. EBT cards. Take a look at the story here. I’m only posting 4 photos but she posted a lot more for the public to see.
In January I blogged about hog numbers expanding. Now more expansion has happened within the state and nationally. That is good news on the supply side which hopefully equates to some lower prices.
Here is more from HoosierAgToday.com –
Indiana’s total hog and pig inventory on March 1 was estimated at 3.65 million head, up 300,000 head from a year ago, according to Greg Matli, State Statistician, of the USDA, NASS, Indiana Field Office.
United States inventory of all hogs and pigs on March 1, 2015 was 65.9 million head. This was up 7 percent from March 1, 2014, but down slightly from December 1, 2014. Breeding inventory, at 5.98 million head, was up 2 percent from last year, and up 1 percent from the previous quarter.
USDA came out with some new numbers on who owns farms in America:
About 2.1 million farms in the U.S., 97 percent are what the report calls “family farms,”according to the the USDA’s 2012 Census of Agriculture Farm Typology.
Other key facts included in the report stated that 88 percent of those 2.1 million farms are classified as “small family farms” — operations with a gross cash farm income (GCFI) of less than $350,000 per year. Those small family farms contribute nearly 60 percent of all direct sales of product from farms to consumers.
You can read the rest via Bjorn Lomborg Facebook page.
A study of food stamp recipients led to an interesting find for one group of college professors. Here is what they found:
When monthly food-stamp distributions fall on a weekend, beer sales to that population jump – by up to 7%.
When food stamp funds are distributed on Saturday or Sunday, monthly sales of beer jump as much as 51 ounces more a month among those eligible for food stamps, the study found. That could be a lot of booze: Close to 23 million households receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, widely known as food stamps, according to the latest government data.
Their research was very extensive and spanned several years.
This jump in beer-buying only appears for food-stamp-eligible households and not for the non-eligible households, according to the report titled “One More Saturday Night: Food Stamp Timing and Monthly Consumption Patterns.”
The authors analyzed data from Nielsen Homescan Consumer Panel Dataset, which includes purchasing information from between 40,000 and 60,000 households in the years from 2004 to 2011. Because the households each use a scanning device, the data includes detailed information about the exact products in the consumer basket including beer and tobacco. What it doesn’t include is what’s spent at bars and restaurants.
You can read the rest of Wall Street Journal article here.
Hoosier Econ 