Agriculture

Many policymakers are thinking about different ways to measure and use student learning outcomes. In this post, I’ll zoom in on how the Department of Education is thinking about learning outcomes in its new Race to the Top competition, which asks school districts to look at outcomes in three ways: using student performance measures, tracking student growth and capturing student performance data.

Last July, Iowa-based Kinze Manufacturing gathered its dealers to debut a new on-farm toy: a John Deere tractor pulling a grain cart. The scene might have been unremarkable—dealers have seen the cart in action countless times—except that there was no one at the wheel.

Generations of kids have grown up forbidden to taste chocolate cake batter. The rationale for this quasi- torture: fear of salmonella poisoning.

And at the current rate of food technology, the kids of 2040 may be eating healthier cookie dough, too—gooey hunks infused with nano-sized nutrients, with chocolate chips engineered to be less fattening.

But future children may never know what salmonella is: A Dutch company is currently developing a consumer spray to kill the bacteria on contact. Salmonelex may sit next to Windex on future kitchen counters.

In my last post, I wrote about the recent National Intelligence Council report on global water security. Here’s the gist of it:

Providing yet another reason for its 9 percent approval rating, Congress is attempting to write the nation’s next farm bill in secrecy—sneaking it into law as part of the deficit reduction package to be produced by the “supercommittee.”

As the U.S. government starts planning budget reductions that will slash everything from defense spending to health care to bridge repair, potential cuts worth around 0.00025 percent of the value of the deficit reduction agreed on in the recent $2 trillion deal appear to have garnered outsized attention: support to farmers' markets. Those $5 million of subsidies are likely to disappear as part of cuts in the 2012 farm bill, and that is provoking much concern.

Last Friday, oil contracts traded in New York closed at $104.42 per barrel, levels not seen since September 2008. This second spike in as many weeks comes after fierce fighting in Libya has raised fears of an extended civil war and the shutdown of what the International Energy Agency estimates might be more than 1 million barrels of oil production per day.

Reuters is also reporting that hedge funds and big speculators have weighed into the market, seeing the real possibility of sustained high prices for petroleum.