Senators from Montana and Wyoming gutted a program that would require most livestock producers to tag their animals with electronic devices. The Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee unanimously cut in half the funding for the National Animal Identification System, reports Tom Lutey of the Billings Gazette. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has argued that the tagging system would allow easy tracking of diseased animals. The USDA has spent $142 million developing the system.
NAIS is widely hated (and massively distrusted) in most ag communities. Opposition has been adamant, especially in the West. And so two western senators — Jon Tester (above), a Montana Democrat, and Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican — teamed up to do in the program by cutting funding. Tester maintains that food safety concerns center in processing plants, not in fields and pastures. "This basically cuts funding by $7.3 million," Tester said. "It basically kind of does what I want to have done, which is take some of the steam out of this program."
"This has Tester over the chest of NAIS with the stake in his hand and the hammer halfway toward a good swing, which is much better," said Dan Teigan of the Western Organization of Resource Councils.
Those who thought the "farm bloc" in Congress went the way of tail fins and rabbit ears have had a surprise, writes Dan Morgan in Sunday's Washington Post. A group of moderate to conservative Democrats from farm states and rural areas have "now hold the fate of health-care legislation in its hands," according to Morgan. They are also shaping the climate change bill and food safety legislation. "You might call these newly empowered farm-state lawmakers the Agracrats," Morgan writes. "They're Democrats, all right. In the House, many of them are newcomers who defeated Republicans in 2006 or 2008. In the Senate, Democrats have 12 of the 18 seats in the central farm belt and northern Great Plains."
It was so much easier being a party that covered a limited amount of territory (ideological and geographic). Now the Democrats have to deal with the Agracrats and the Blue Dogs, the formal caucus of moderate Democratic House members. They overlap a bit and, Morgan writes, they "share a prairie-populist wariness of Wall Street and Washington that has been heightened by last year's financial meltdown and the ensuing government bailouts."
Going forward, according to Morgan, "agricultural interests will press to either kill or further rewrite the climate change bill." They are active on making sure rural hospitals get a fair shake in the health reform bill. And they keeping are protecting the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which they believe protects rural areas against manipulation of grain markets.
Lynda Waddington at the Iowa Independent reports that there's been a 20% increase in calls to a hotline set up to serve farmers in seven Midwestern states. Not only are there more calls to the Sowing the Seeds of Hope hotline, Waddington reports, the "content of the calls is changing," said a hotline supervisor. "The callers are reporting much more severe economic turmoil, more mental health symptoms and significant increases in mental stress."
This isn't a good sign. During the farm crises of the 1980s, farm suicides spiked. Iowa and Nebraska developed their hotlines then to serve ag workers. Waddington's argument in her Independent story is that the hotline works. Suicides appear to be down in the state where the hotline. And that as farm troubles appear to be on the rise — particularly within the dairy sector — she says this would be the time for Congress to fully fund the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network.
Congress approved the Network with the 2008 farm bill. "The network creates a national crisis hotline for rural workers and also mandates additional behavioral health services in geographically rural regions," Waddington writes. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, however, says he doesn't see much hope for additional funding.
The liberal-leaning Center for American Progress has published a column titled "Rural America Would Win Big with Senate Climate Action." Jake Caldwell argues that the pending climate change bill could raise farm incomes while doing nothing "places the fate of U.S. agriculture in a byzantine administrative process of federal regulation led by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act." Also, Caldwell writes, there are clear benefits to farmers in the House version of the bill.
Caldwell lists the "gains for rural America secured in the House bill..." There include exemptions for ag and forestry from cap and trade, he writes, and incentives for farmers to use their lands as a "carbon sink," where carbon emissions can be captured. Farmers can "earn real money selling carbon offsets" through tree planting, modest tillage practices and winer cover cropping -- stuff that many farmers already do.
Caldwell also notes that the bills encourage biofuels and wind energy production. He does not address the damage done by the construction of thousands of miles of transmission lines needed to transfer wind power from the farm to the city. Nor does he mention the disadvantage coal-based power plants in the middle of the U.S. will have under the new act. But this is interesting reading at a time when the Senate Ag committee is now taking up the climate change bill.
The nomination of Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein (above) to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has hung up on the question of whether animals have the right to sue other animals, notably of the human kind. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican, has blocked Sunstein's nomination, according to The Hill, "because Sunstein has argued that animals should have the right to sue humans in court."
Sunstein is a prolific author and a long-time friend of Obama. (Sunstein just recently moved to Harvard from the University of Chicago.) In one of his books, Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (2004), Sunstein wrote: “I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law....Laws designed to protect animals against cruelty and abuse should be amended or interpreted to give a private cause of action against those who violate them, so as to allow private people to supplement the efforts of public prosecutors.” Sunstein has also suggested, in a speech, that hunting should be banned.
This has caused all kinds of consternation in the ag community. Cattle Network asks "Who Is Cass Sunstein & Why Should You Care?" hThe Hill reports that Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas has met with Sunstein and was told the nominee would not promote onerous regulations. Chambliss remains to be convinced. "I'm going to talk to him," Chambliss said. "He has not had the opportunity to look me in the eye."
Is corn being demonized, and the corn farmer, too? Baby powder and ethanol, hog feed and the futures market -- Richard Oswald looks at the controversies behind his mainstay crop.
The Financial Times reports that the G8 countries will announce a "food security initiative" at a summit this week that will commit "more than $12bn (£7.3bn) for agricultural development over the next three years, in a move that signals a further shift from food aid to long-term investments in farming in the developing world." The change in tactics comes at a time when increased commodity prices and stagnant agricultural investment have led to an increase in the number of people worldwide who are hungry to over one billion.
For the past two decades, the U.S. has provided mostly food aid. The Obama administration is shifting to a policy that encourages increased agricultural productivity in poorer nations. "For too long, our primary response [to fight hunger] has been to send emergency [food] aid when the crisis is at its worst," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last month. "This saves lives, but it doesn't address hunger's root causes. It is, at best, a short-term fix."
The change in policy could cause some conflict in U.S. farm communities. The U.S. spent over $2 billion last year on American-grown crops shipped overseas. A shift to local production in poorer countries could diminish U.S. exports. The U.S. spends 20 times more on food aid in Africa than on efforts to boost food production, however. According to the FT, "annual spending on African farming projects topped $400m in the 1980s, but by 2006 had dwindled to $60m...."
Your Yonder editors visited the church picnic in Dubina, Texas, Sunday. Dubina is in Fayette County, the heartland of Czech Texas and so there was lots of polka music and kolaches up for auction at the church fundraiser.
We know the ground is too wet in parts of the Midwest, but here ranchers are suffering through a brutal drought. Central Texas has run out of categories for bad when it comes to a lack of rain. We went into Dubina's beautiful Sts. Cyril and Methodius Church (interior photo above) and found copies of a "Prayer For Rain" in every pew. It goes, in part, like this:
"We come now with You in our hearts, to pray for rain. We are firmly convinced that You, according to the measure of Your wisdom, goodness and love, have the omnipotent power to send us the rain we need. We ask this in humility, knowing Your great goodness. We also ask of You to guide us in the right path, to restrain us from evil, and to preserve us from misfortune of soul and body. We ask that we may be made worthy of Your great kindness in granting our request. We beg Your assistance, remembering Your words,'Ask and you shall receive.' Amen."