Walter Falcon, the Helen Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy in Economics (emeritus), writes from an unusual perspective. During the academic year he serves as a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He spends the summers on his family farm near Marion, Iowa. He returns to campus each year with reflections on the challenges and rewards of faming life in his "Almanac Report." Falcon is former deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. 

September means that it is time again for my annual Iowa farm report, the sixth edition in this series. As readers of prior postings will remember, my day job is Professor of International Agricultural Policy at Stanford University. However, my wife and I also own a 200-acre farm near Marion, Iowa, where we spend summers watching over corn, soybean, and alfalfa fields, and gazing out at a growing cow-calf herd.

After all these years, it is still difficult for me to describe the differences in pace, politics, and age structure in Iowa relative to California. I am now 81, and at Stanford I feel ancient; in Iowa, I am just one of the boys, since 41 percent of farm owners are 75 or older. 

This summer’s weather, especially rainfall, has been almost perfect for crops in our area. Although western Iowa and the northern Great Plains experienced drought, we are expecting record yields of both corn and soybeans, possibly reaching 225 and 55 bushels per acre, respectively. Unfortunately, December corn prices are only about $3.50 per bushel. This level is just half of what it was five years ago. The old adage that farmers should raise more hell and less corn has taken on new meaning. Average prices of Iowa farmland have slipped from about $9,000 to $7,000 per acre during the past five years (though still remarkably high relative to the $2,000 that prevailed in 2000). Renters of land are also feeling price pressures. Average cash rents have fallen about 10 percent over the past two years and now average about $230 per acre in our part of the state.

The difference between the “almost perfect” weather described above and an absolute disaster measured about three miles this year. During much of June, our area was hit with very unstable air. The worst episode was on June 28 when an EF-2 tornado came barreling right at our farm. The picture below was taken out of the west window before we scampered down to the safe room in our basement. At the last minute, the tornado veered slightly, going just between our farm and the bustling county fair (also shown) four miles to the north. The tornado then touched down a few miles to our east, crushed the historic Brown farm, and mostly destroyed the small town of Prairieburg. Amazingly, both our farm and the fair were completely spared except for a few broken tree limbs.

There is an interesting footnote on risk to this story. When I show the tornado picture to my California friends they cannot understand why I would live in such a risky place; however, my Iowa friends frequently remark that they cannot comprehend how I can live in the risky state of California with its earthquakes. Risk, like beauty, is sometimes in the eyes of the beholder.

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Not everything from the sky was bad this year, although one other episode also turned out to be a non-event. Our region was to have had 90 percent coverage during the eclipse. We were completely socked in by clouds, however, and could see absolutely nothing on this historic occasion. On the other hand, airplane applications of fungicides and pesticides were greater than I can ever remember. A combination of new weeds to the region (water hemp and Palmer amaranth) and growing weed resistance in Roundup-ready soybeans are causing increased problems for farmers. As for the applicators, I never cease to be impressed by the skill (craziness?) of those pilots who fly at 50 feet or less, dodging power lines, while managing controls of the spray equipment as well as the plane.

Describing another “sky” event at the farm requires that I first remove considerable amounts of egg from my face. Stanford sits in the middle of Silicon Valley, and over the past decade perhaps a dozen firms have visited my office regarding agricultural applications. Particularly in the earlier years, I assured them that precision agriculture was overrated and that drones would never have a place in agriculture. Those were not among my better forecasts!

My conjecture is that more than 90 percent of the fields in Iowa have now been laid out with GPS grid maps that permit automatic steering of tractors and harvesters. Famers rarely steer or look ahead; rather they mostly look backward at planters and other equipment. From gauge-filled cabs that resemble cockpits, farmers monitor yields, seed-planting rates, and fertilizer applications in ways that produce field maps for each 10x10 meter sub-plot. In some sense, producers already have more data than they can assimilate, so one could reasonably ask, can drones really help? It turns out that they can, and they can do so for only a small investment.

The high quality drone shown below, complete with two 30-minute batteries, costs about $2,000, with quality determined mostly by the precision of its camera. (That sum may not be petty cash, but it is not in the same league as a $600,000 combine-harvester either.) For mapping work, drones are connected to an off-site service center that costs about $100 per month. They produce video in real-time, snap images as well, and are proving useful in determining if the number of emergent plants (really the lack of plants) on areas that may require replanting; in checking fields for “wet spots” after rains for indicators of future tiling needs; and watching the cow herd from the back porch, as is also shown below. Applications are ever underway that can take the temperatures of animals via intricate heat-sensing devices.

Once corn grows to chest high, it is impossible to walk or drive through fields to isolate areas with particular weed problems or to view pest damage. These drones are also tied in with GPS systems, so that entire fields can be mapped “automatically” at very high resolution. A 100-acre field can be mapped within the 25 minutes of a single battery-powered flight. (The further good news is that the machines are smart enough to return to their takeoff point before losing power.) Drones seem to be here to stay because they save labor, generate useful data, and help improve farm-management practices

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Drones, however, have not affected my image of the old limestone “restaurant” where neighborhood farmers gather about 8 a.m. Most of the “action” is around the big table where truly terrible coffee is self-served. Payment is on the honor system, since there is rarely a waitress around. Maybe it was just my imagination, but farmer discussions seemed more somber and narrower this year, despite the good weather. Perhaps it is the third successive year of low prices, or the uncertainty about corn exports to Mexico and China, or the general chaos in Washington, D.C. Perhaps it also reflects the ethnic and religious homogeneity of the local population. Stanford’s undergraduate student body, for example, is only 45 percent white. However, during the course of all of my personal interactions during four months in Iowa, I encountered only three minority persons – two medical doctors at the local hospital whose families came from India, and one African-American. Homogeneity and diversity make for different worldviews and different conversations – neither being necessarily better or worse, but certainly different.

The most animated discussion I participated in concerned technology gone astray. Large chemical companies, such as Monsanto and DuPont, have purchased many seed companies, thereby assuring markets for their particular brand of chemicals. In the case of corn, for example, a particular GMO variety has been bred such that, when sprayed by a particular brand, all plants are killed except for the corn. Spraying these herbicides requires training and specialized equipment, and herbicide applications are frequently hired – typically for about $8 per acre, plus the cost of chemicals. As part of the new technology, the specific corn variety and the particular brand of spray are entered into the software that then uses GPS maps to control the actual spraying. But what happens when the hired vendor, in this case a local co-operative, enters the wrong variety into the computer, as happened to two of our neighbors? The spray killed the weeds, but it also killed the corn. At that point, it was too late in the season to replant. These fields were sorry looking messes, and the debate still continues as to who is liable and for how much.

Another hot button item this year centered on the purchase of farmland for housing developments. Farmers almost universally regard such investments as unwarranted intrusions into their space. (The proposed relocation of the county landfill generated even more vehement responses.) The housing argument typically took two forms: more houses mean more children and therefore higher property taxes for schools; and theses houses take “all of the good Iowa farmland”, which is needed to feed the world. There is some correctness to the former argument, but as to the latter assertion – not so much. I argued that for the last five years, total acres of corn and soybeans in Iowa had trended upward rather than downward, and that furthermore, both current and future problems of hunger were driven primarily by poverty, not the lack of corn and soybean supplies. This comment was not regarded as being helpful to the coffee-crowd discussion!

Politics are rarely discussed in these conversations – at least in my presence. However, I sense several things. Although Iowans voted for Donald Trump, I think it was because they generally disliked him less than they disliked Hilary Clinton. Most of my neighbors now simply seem embarrassed by what is happening. My California friends continue to ask me about what Iowans think and what they believe in. There is not much open discussion about these matters either, which made a July poll of the Des Moines Register all the more interesting. When given a choice of 17 options of whom they believed, the top six in order were: the armed forces, God, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, local schools, the Farm Bureau, and the FBI. The three options they believed in least, also in order from the bottom, were the U.S. Congress, the media, and the President. I do not know what a comparable survey in California would look like, but I believe that it would be considerably different.

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At the end of last year’s report, I left readers hanging with the question of whether our seemingly disinterested yearling bull would produce a crop of calves. It turns out that my fears were misplaced, and that he was indeed working the night shift. Our problems were in fact on the female side—our best cow did not conceive, and another of our good cows produced a sickly calf that ended up being bottle-fed by my wife. To compete the story, we again rented a red Angus bull – the same one in fact that we had last year – and he is now a much larger two-year old. But he is still no competition for “Upward”, the strangely named Angus super-bull winner at the Iowa State Fair that weighed 2,798 pounds.

I leave in a week for yet another year of teaching and research at Stanford. I have only a limited number of lectures scheduled, and most of my time will be directed toward research on the growing importance of tropical vegetable oils, particularly from oil palm in Indonesia. Palm oil has recently replaced soybean oil as the most important in world commerce, so even when I am in California, there remain important and unusual Iowa connections.

My neighbor says that I must leave Iowa soon – because of the upcoming weather. In true Almanac fashion, he confidently predicts an early and harsh winter ahead. His evidence – the deer are weaning their young at an early date, and are busy consuming great quantities of corn from our fields, so as to layer on fat for the winter. We might even be able to see the extent of their gluttony on our autumn yield maps!

The Stanford Center at Peking University (SCPKU) on August 26 hosted a forum, “Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization,” which included the launch of a book of the same name and a panel discussion. 

The book explores the key institutional and governance challenges China will face in reaching its ambitious targets for sustainable, human-centered, and environmentally friendly urbanization as part of the next phase of the country’s National New Urbanization Plan (2014-20). Book authors Karen Eggleston, Director of the Asia Health Policy Program at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and Senior Fellow in Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Jean C. Oi, Stanford’s William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics, Founding Director of Shorenstein APARC’s China Program and SCPKU Director, and Wang Yiming, Vice President and Senior Research Fellow at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), attended the launch and participated in the panel discussion.  In her welcoming remarks, Professor Oi briefly introduced the book, the result of a close, 5-year collaboration between Shorenstein APARC and the NDRC. In addition to qualitative data and fieldwork, the book covers comparative analyses among countries, such as the spatial distribution of urbanization in China, India and the United States.

Other panel speakers included Canfei He, Dean of Peking University’s College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Yulong Shi, Director of NDRC’s Institute of Spatial Planning and Regional Economy, Yongzhi Hou, Director-General and Research Fellow of the Department of Development Strategy and Regional Economy at the Development Research Center of the State Council, and Sangay Penjor, Director of the Asian Development Bank’s Urban and Social Sectors Division, East Asia Department. 

During the panel discussion, Dr. Hou pointed out that the publication gave an accurate and objective description of China’s urbanization that could help deepen the understanding of problems in China’s urbanization efforts.

Wang Yiming summarized the book’s content in the context of the household registration system, land system, public service, housing system, finance, financial policy, and administration policy. He suggested that in past forty years, a large number of the rural population has moved to form enormous urban hubs in various cities in China. The Chinese government is targeting 100 million of the 260 million people who are residing in cities to complete their citizenization by 2020. Prof. Wang introduced current urbanization reform plans to close this gap, policies that relate to the household registration system, urban “zero threshold” access, and policies on public services such as education and health care, and intergenerational inheritance.

The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford is now accepting applications for the Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship in Contemporary Asia, an opportunity made available to two junior scholars for research and writing on Asia.

Fellows conduct research on contemporary political, economic or social change in the Asia-Pacific region, and contribute to Shorenstein APARC’s publications, conferences and related activities. To read about this year’s fellows, please click here.

The fellowship is a 10-mo. appointment during the 2018-19 academic year, and carries a salary rate of $52,000 plus $2,000 for research expenses.

For further information and to apply, please click here. The application deadline is Dec. 20, 2017.

In a Q&A with Elisabeth Eaves at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, CISAC's Siegfried Hecker explains how the latest North Korean nuclear test is different, what North Korea's capabilities are now and how the U.S. could respond.

A new biosecurity initiative at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) aims to identify and mitigate biological risks, both natural and man-made, and safeguard the future of the life sciences and associated technologies.

The initiative will be led by David A. Relman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and FSI. Relman, the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in the Departments of Medicine, and Microbiology & Immunology, has served as the science co-director at CISAC for the past four years. He will leave this position on Aug. 31 to lead the new initiative.

Michael McFaul, director and senior fellow at FSI, said, “With exceptional leadership skills, valuable experience and abundant energy, David Relman is ideally positioned to work with scholars from across campus who offer critical expertise in biosecurity. This is an exciting, challenging and important new initiative for FSI that is designed to protect public health from the many new risks now accelerating.”

Relman said the biosecurity initiative will seek to advance the beneficial applications of the life sciences while reducing the risks of misuse by promoting research, education and policy outreach in biological security. His CISAC leadership gives him the know-how to lead such a wide-ranging effort across diverse disciplines and communities.

Relman said, “The opportunity to serve as co-director at CISAC has been a wonderful experience, one that has afforded me the chance to get to know outstanding faculty and staff, their scholarship, and critical policy-relevant work, all of which I had not fully appreciated sitting across campus. This experience has made clear the unusual qualities of Stanford University, and the great people that work here. I am now greatly looking forward to this new opportunity at FSI.”

Biosecurity collaborations

During Relman’s term as CISAC’s science co-director from 2013-2017, he led an expansion of the transdisciplinary work in science and security to include biology, biological and other areas of engineering, medicine, and earth and environmental sciences.

The foundations for work in biological science, technology and security were established at CISAC, especially in the hiring of Megan Palmer, a senior research scholar at CISAC and FSI. Both Relman and Palmer worked together on engagements and discussions with a growing network of more than 20 faculty involved in biosecurity across Stanford.

Palmer said, “Stanford has an opportunity and imperative to advance security strategies for biological science and technology in a global age. Our faculty bring together expertise in areas including technology, policy, and ethics, and are deeply engaged in shaping future of biotechnology policy and practices.”

New insights, new risks

In his new post, Relman said he intends to build on this foundation by creating an initiative that consolidates and focuses activity in biosecurity, develops research and educational programs, attracts new resources, and looks outward at opportunities for policy impact and changing practices across the globe.

Relman said that “new capabilities and insights are reshaping important aspects of the life sciences and associated technologies, and are accompanied by a host of new risks.” If misused, whether by malice or accident, “they pose the potential for large-scale harm,” he noted.

Relman added that the initiative will bring together interest and expertise across the centers and programs of FSI in partnership with Schools and Departments across the university.

At FSI, CISAC will co-sponsor the biological security initiative, which will leverage Stanford expertise in the life sciences, engineering, law and policy.  Key partners will include Tim Stearns (biology), Drew Endy (bioengineering), Mildred Cho (bioethics), and Hank Greely (law), according to Relman. The biosecurity group will also partner with another new program at FSI in global health and conflict, which is led by Paul Wise, Frank Fukuyama, Steve Stedman, Steve Krasner, and others, he added.

Stanford’s School of Medicine and Department of Medicine will also co-sponsor the initiative, thanks to leadership from Lloyd Minor, Michele Barry and Robert Harrington. Relman looks forward to establishing similar relationships with other schools and departments, he said.

 “These partnerships are critical. I’m excited to work with a growing community both within and beyond Stanford towards the goal of a peaceful and prosperous world in the century of biology,” he said.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

David Relman, Center for International Security and Cooperation: relman@stanford.edu

Megan Palmer, Center for International Security and Cooperation:  mjpalmer@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Siegfried S. Hecker wrote the following essay for Politico Magazine on the subject of the Trump administration's approach to North Korea:

Now that the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula has been at least temporarily defused thanks to Kim Jong Un’s announcement that he would wait and see before launching missiles toward Guam—despite ominous North Korean propaganda as the U.S. and South Korea launch their latest joint military exercises—it’s time to step back and ask ourselves the big questions about just how useful our approach to North Korea’s nuclear program has been so far. 

My answer: Not very useful at all. During the past 15 years, North Korea first built the bomb and then expanded it to a nuclear arsenal that threatens the region, while Washington has continued to deny reality with its call for complete denuclearization. Which is why it’s time to take a long and serious look at the next option: talking with North Korea.

Although a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Secretaries Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson earlier this month served to lower tensions by stating that the United States was still pursuing peaceful denuclearization, it does not introduce any new elements that could bring the two sides closer to ending the nuclear crisis. The op-ed, which reassured Kim that “the U.S. has no interest in regime change or accelerated reunification of Korea,” is a welcome relief from Mr. Trump’s “fire and fury” warning to Kim. But this approach is likely to fare no better in compelling Pyongyang give up its nuclear weapons than the Obama administration’s “strategic patience.”

So—how can we make real progress?

Washington should drop its preoccupation with North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) threat. It is misplaced and dangerous. Instead, Trump administration officials should talk with Pyongyang, face to face, without any preconditions, to avert what I consider the greatest North Korean nuclear threat—that of stumbling into an inadvertent nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula, which may lead to hundreds of thousands deaths including thousands of American citizens.

It’s important to understand why Kim is so obsessed with these weapons: to deter the United States from attacking North Korea and what Pyongyang calls “hostile policies.” Striking the U.S. with a nuclear-tipped missile would be suicide, and there’s no evidence that Kim is suicidal.

What’s more, there’s a lot to indicate that North Korea isn’t close enough to developing ICBM-capable missiles to strike the United States even if it wanted to. The panic over North Korea’s missiles was elevated recently when leaked classified U.S. intelligence estimates were reported to indicate that Pyongyang has already achieved such capabilities, in addition to possessing as many as 60 nuclear weapons in its arsenal. But I don’t concur with those estimates.

Based on my 50 years of experience with nuclear technologies and nuclear weapons, combined with what I saw and learned during my seven visits to North Korea beginning in 2004, I don’t believe Pyongyang has yet mastered the key elements of delivering a nuclear-tipped ICBM to the continental United States. Although North Korea demonstrated significant progress in the missile field with two launches in July, experts have raised serious questions about whether it has demonstrated all the missile and re-entry vehicle technologies that will protect the nuclear warheads during the fiery plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Moreover, the nuclear warhead that must be mounted on the missile is the least developed and least tested part of North Korea’s nuclear ICBM ambitions. It must survive the extreme temperatures and mechanical stresses involved during launch, flight and re-entry into the atmosphere. It must detonate above the target by design, not accidentally explode on launch or burn up during reentry. More missile tests are needed that mirror real ICBM conditions to permit measurements that more accurately define the extreme conditions that the delicate materials such as plutonium, highly enriched uranium and chemical high explosives experience inside the warheads. It is much simpler to detonate a nuclear device in an underground tunnel under controlled conditions than to simulate all of the conditions a warhead experiences on the way to its target. 

What makes matters even more challenging for Pyongyang is that it has very little plutonium and highly enriched uranium. I have estimated that North Korea has 20 to 40 kilograms plutonium and 200 to 450 kilograms highly enriched uranium. My analysis is based on what I saw during my visits to the Yongbyon nuclear complex and on extensive discussions with their nuclear experts. These stocks have to serve multiple uses: They must be shared between experiments required to understand the world’s most complex elements, nuclear tests to certify the design of the weapons and stock for the arsenal. My best estimate, albeit with considerable uncertainty, is that the North’s combined inventories of plutonium and highly enriched uranium suffice for perhaps 20 to 25 nuclear weapons, not the 60 reported in the leaked intelligence estimate.

North Korea will need a few more nuclear tests because its experience with either material, plutonium or highly enriched uranium, for warheads is too limited for ICBM use. Nuclear test site preparations appear complete, but Pyongyang is most likely weighing the technical benefits against the political risks of conducting such tests. Whereas I believe North Korea has insufficient test data for ICBM warheads, we must assume it has already learned enough to mount a warhead on its shorter-range missiles that can reach all of South Korea and Japan because these missiles are able to accommodate bigger nuclear warheads and these would experience less stringent operational conditions.

In other words, the North still has a ways to go to pose a serious ICBM threat, but it is clearly working in that direction. The danger is that in his drive to achieve a greater balance with the United States by perfecting a missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to the continental U.S., Kim could miscalculate where Trump’s red line actually is, triggering a retaliatory action by Trump that could escalate to a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula. Our problem is that we know nothing about Kim and the military leaders who control his nuclear arsenal and drive the missile and nuclear development programs. It’s time to talk and find out.

And we have to talk now, without demanding that North Korea agree to any preconditions, such as those suggested by Mattis and Tillerson – namely, an immediate cessation of its provocative threats, nuclear tests, missile launches and other weapons tests. Pyongyang is not about to make unilateral concessions before talks. One should read Kim’s announcement that he will wait with the missile launches as a positive signal, although he added that the U.S. must stop its “arrogant provocations.”

The diplomatic opening created last week on both sides makes such talks possible. President Trump should send a small team of senior military and diplomatic leaders to talk to Pyongyang. These talks would not be negotiations—not yet. Importantly, these talks would not be a reward or a concession to Pyongyang and should not be construed as signaling acceptance of a nuclear-armed North Korea. Talking would, however, be a necessary step toward re-establishing critical links of communication to avoid a nuclear catastrophe. The dialogue should stress the need for mechanisms to avoid misunderstanding, miscalculation or misinterpretation of actions that could quickly bring us over the cliff into a nuclear war.

The talks would provide an opportunity to convey Secretary Tillerson’s message that Washington does not seek regime change face to face in Pyongyang. In simplest terms, the team could underline the message that Washington is deterred from attacking the North, but not from defending the United States and its allies. It should reiterate that any attack on South Korea or Japan, be it with conventional, chemical or nuclear weapons, would bring a devastating retaliatory response upon North Korea.

The team can also impress upon Pyongyang that ensuring the safety and security of nuclear weapons is an awesome responsibility. These two issues are becoming more challenging as North Korea strives to make its nuclear arsenal more combat-ready. A nuclear-weapon accident in the North would be disastrous, as would a struggle to control the North’s nuclear weapons in the case of attempted regime change from within or without. All indications are that such talks would be strongly supported by the North’s two most important neighbors, South Korea and China, particularly if Washington consults them before.

For too long, America’s policy toward North Korea has been based on impractical goals. Complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization was a hallmark of the George W. Bush administration’s approach to North Korea and was also pursued by the Obama administration. Whereas complete and verifiable denuclearization might be realistic long-term goals, irreversible is impossible short of the total loss of human memory. The U.S. Manhattan Project produced the bomb in 27 months more than 70 years ago, and that was without knowing with certainty at the outset that it was even possible.

It was under Bush that North Korea first built the bomb and under Obama that it expanded to a threatening nuclear arsenal. Both presidents failed to address the root cause of Pyongyang’s determined effort to build a nuclear weapons arsenal—assuring the Kim regime’s security. Now, Trump faces a North Korea with the ability to inflict unacceptable damage to U.S. allies and U.S. assets in the region, while it also continues its drive to threaten the continental U.S. Perhaps, much as Dwight Eisenhower talked to Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon to China’s Mao Zedong, and Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev, Trump can take the next step with North Korea, and talk now to avert a nuclear catastrophe.