Fall is Midwest Lawn Care Season

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You can’t tell from the advertising on TV and radio, but in the Midwest, fall is lawn care season. That’s something I learned a long time ago. It’s not something you hear much about and I’m not exactly sure why. But if you want a head start in the spring, this is the time to do a little work.

And if you listen to my show at all, you know that, if you must have a lawn, I preach the gospel of natural (organic, if you will) lawn care. Which is why Ryan Anderson from Midwest Grows Green is back with us today. Ryan joined us in May to promote Chicago Grows Green week. Now, he’s here to talk about working with Stonyfield Organic on a program called PlayFree to help 35 U.S. communities implement organic parks.

MGG is “managing” two projects–one for the Lisle, Illinois Park District (which happened last Saturday) and one for the City of East Grand Rapids, Michigan. In fact, they’ll be hosting Grand Rapids Grows Green Weekend September 19-21.

If you’re looking for lawn care help, MGG has updated their Natural Lawn Care Provider List.

If you want to know what it’s like on the front lines, Brandon Losey from Ringer’s Landscaping also joins the conversation.

Last but not least, talking about lawn care gives me a chance to once again post my graphic about how 4-step programs work. I’m not even sure that the big lawn care companies even promote 4-step programs anymore, but it’s still great to poke fun at them.

 

Sabotaging science at the USDA

You might have read an article with a headline like this in early July.

Scientists flee USDA as research agencies move to Kansas City area

In this article from July 15, 2019, The Hill reports on a controversial decision by the United States Department of Agriculture to move researchers from Washington, D.C. to the Kansas City area. About two thirds of the employees have refused the reassignment.

Critics see the move, set to be completed by Sept. 30, as yet another example of the Trump administration looking to sideline scientists and researchers, keeping them away from the corridors of power. Administration officials deny that, calling it a cost-saving move intended to have researchers closer to farmers.

I’m not even going to give lip service to the idea that the move is a way for the administration to save money. First, there are conflicting numbers about that. Second, the nearly 400 jobs at stake are at the Economic Research Service (ERS), a statistical agency, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), which funds cutting-edge agricultural science. And anybody who has been paying attention knows that science is not a favored word at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Our guest this morning is Rebecca Boehm, an economist with the Food & Environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a piece headlined USDA Provides Blueprint for Dismantling a Government Research Agency, Boehm notes that the move to Kansas City is just one of the ways that the USDA agencies are under fire.

For scientists, it’s a significant accomplishment to get your work published in a peer-reviewed journal. The process of submitting a paper, fielding reviewer comments, and revising the work can take months (or years!), and final publication in a respected journal lends credibility to any researcher’s work.

So it was odd when the Washington Post reported last week that USDA was now requiring its researchers to label outside peer-reviewed scientific publications with the word “preliminary”. But this wasn’t actually news to me. And it isn’t the only way the Trump administration is undermining the USDA’s important research role.

She goes on to write that the Trump Administration is proposing steep funding cuts to USDA research, and the ERS in particular seems to have a target on its back.

These cuts would eliminate huge swathes of research ERS conducts. The most recent budget proposal zeroes out research on food consumption and nutrition; invasive species; markets for environmental services; bioenergy and renewable energy; agricultural research investments; international food security; food and nutrition assistance; drought resilience; rural economics; beginning farmers and ranchers; and local/regional food markets.

What remains is bare bones. The only research the administration wants to continue, according to its official budget document, concerns farm business, household income and wealth, agricultural cost of production, and farm practice adoption.

Meanwhile, the USDA, under Secretary Sonny Perdue, is moving full speed ahead towards Kansas City despite a report released by the USDA’s Office of Inspector General that the move might be in violation of the 2018 appropriations act. The story, reported in the Washington Post, also notes that USDA isn’t the only agency that might be packing boxes.

By 2020, more than 80 percent of the headquarters staff at the Bureau of Land Management will be moved west of the Rocky Mountains, the Interior Department told lawmakers in July. The Trump administration also wants to break up the Office of Personnel Management and split 5,500 workers among three other departments.

White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney might have let the cat out of the bag at a recent fundraiser about the real reason for the decision.

“Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,” he continued Friday, citing his own experiences. But by simply saying to workers that they would have to move “out into the real part of the country,” the agency had achieved its goal.

“What a wonderful way to streamline government, and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time,” Mulvaney said. Applause rolled across the Silver Elephant fundraising gala.

So, if in your office pool, you had “reduce the size of government until you can drown it in a bathtub,” as the reason why all of this is happening, you might be a winner.

Regardless, this decision, in addition to throwing stick into the wheel spokes of science, is causing a lot of misery among government workers. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) writes that the government “bungled” the negotiations.

According to USDA’s plan, employees had until July 15 to either accept or decline relocation, but officials told reporters and employees they could change their minds before the report date of Sept. 30…

But now USDA said the employees were to have decided by July 15. In a July 24 letter to Van Hollen, Perdue said the July 15 deadline “did not get extended.”

The ERS also walked back on a tentative agreement reached with AFGE on July 24.

That isn’t “bungling” negotiations. That is bargaining in bad faith.

Any way you slice it, science at the USDA and in America is under attack. We talk to UCS’s Rebecca Boehm about it on today’s show.