Country Corner

You can’t buy cool

Command and control of what used to be called global warming is command and control of your operation

by Steve Fairchild

By the time you read this, the comment period on EPA’s proposal to use the Federal Clean Air Act as a bludgeon against agriculture and industry will be nearly over. The agency’s idea is to reign in emissions of what it calls greenhouse gases in effort to control the earth’s climate. Methane and nitrous oxide are on the list, and both are produced in normal agricultural production. I hope you’ve written in to explain what such a regulation would mean to your farm. If the deadline has been extended by popular outcry, by all means, warm up your pen and get writing. And, let us hope for an injection of common sense as the proposal is deliberated.

As a new tactic, I included a 5-by-7-inch glossy photo of myself holding a sharpened pitchfork and a torch in my letter of comment. I was going to suggest you do the same in an earlier editorial, but perhaps you should wait to see how it turns out for me. No sense in volunteering for an NSA database.

Yes, the idea of including a picture with a sharpened pitchfork is a joke. But the imagery it evokes—an angry, vigilante mob—isn’t far off the mark.

The pace at which the federal regulatory machine now churns is worrisome. And, worry is never far from anger when it concerns land and livelihoods.

Local leadership may get the message that farmers (large and small, by the way) will be greatly affected by the stable of regulations on tap in Washington D.C., but the elected and bureaucratic leadership outside of our immediate geography doesn’t understand the message’s urgency. Nor do they understand the aptness of my pitchfork-and-torch metaphor.

If getting to the grassroots of the political zeitgeist is what politicians want, they would do well to come to the country and take in the grassroots smell of resentment for a proposal that would help mow down an industry.

EPA’s use of the Clean Air Act is a grab for the power to control increasingly minute levels of agriculture, transportation and industry. The proposed regulation is based on what a significant portion of the population, including scientists, have come to consider dodgy statistics. If enacted, it would trigger the need for farms to obtain permits for emission of the gases I mention above. That would mean a per-animal cost to get permits for the methane produced by livestock and a who-knows-what-measure permit for the nitrous oxide that comes from getting nitrogen into the soil and available as plant food.

It’s a cost burden at every turn—for the producer, for the regulator and for enforcement.

At the same time that we are debating how to measure, permit and regulate, there is a move in the world to modernize large swaths of agricultural land. A story called Outsourcing’s Third Wave in the May 21, 2009 edition of the Economist should be an eye opener for U.S. farmers and those who regulate them.

The feature describes the agricultural land grab underway by China, South Korea and various oil-rich states. Find it online at www.economist.com. The gist of the story is that these countries, and especially China, have embarked on a neo-colonial march toward secure food production.

They’re doing it by buying land in Africa and other developing regions with the intention of setting up large-scale and modernized farms—many of which will grow cereal grains.

Leaving aside the questionable dealings employed to secure some of this land, it’s not likely that a Chinese mega-farm, to borrow a term, will have much concern about measuring pounds of nitrous oxide or methane as it wafts into the air. Nor will they especially worry about many of the things we’ve built into our notion of good stewardship. Beijing, she doesn’t worry about much at all. Just ask the folks who used to live in the river valleys now occupied by the water behind Three Gorges Dam.

Some regulation is necessary. If it is well researched, well defined and provides the protections it intends, it can even be called good. But, we must recognize that regulating from the shaky ground of controlling the climate is self-inflicted damage to our national industry, especially when the rest of the world isn’t playing along. For agriculture, it is a purchase of competitive disadvantage. That’s one purchase we can ill afford.

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