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Farm Bureau re-emphasizes cap and trade opposition

American Farm Bureau delegates approved a resolution opposing Congressional cap and trade proposals. The resolution also supports legislation to suspend Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. 

The resolution asserts that cap and trade legislation would result in higher production costs far outweighing the benefits of agricultural offsets. 

American Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman says the resolution should not be misconstrued by critics as the organization moving away from conservation values.

“What we mean is, we don’t want any misguided climate change legislation that’s going downsize American agriculture and put a burden on this country,” said Stallman during a news conference following the delegate session Tuesday. “We still support all of the same conservation and voluntary incentive-based environmental programs that we have in the past; that hasn’t changed.”

Stallman made reference to his Sunday annual address to Farm Bureau members, in which he stated that farmers and ranchers should stand up to attacks on food production practices. “So if [critics] try to paint us with that brush, I’m going to stand up and tell them they’re wrong.”

Nebraska Farm Bureau President Keith Olsen is not comfortable with cap and trade proposals because he fears the benefits of agricultural offsets that are part of the proposal are not available to all farmers and ranchers in his state.

“Other producers that cannot have certain practices, such as in Nebraska, sugar beet growers, dry edible bean producers and a lot of our livestock people who will not qualify offset payments, but yet they’ll have the increase in costs,” Olsen said, referring to higher energy prices that many say will result from current proposals. “We’re going to oppose it as much as we can.”

The so-called Sense of the Delegate Resolution on cap and trade has been anticipated as one of the significant pieces of business to be considered at the 2010 American Farm Bureau convention. Illinois Farm Bureau President Philip Nelson says his organization has been preparing for it.

“We have been very engaged with this, reaching out to agribusiness and other groups, [and] the Chamber of Commerce to just show them the impact that this will have on agriculture,” said Nelson, in an interview with Brownfield.

Indiana Farm Bureau President Don Villwock says it’s important to producers in his state.

“Cap and trade is a big issue for us,” Villwock told Brownfield just after introducing former Congressman Charlie Stenholm to a large audience of American Farm Bureau members. “Our state is 94 percent dependent on coal, we’re a big fossil fuel state, [and] most of the Midwest is. Agriculture is a big energy user.”

There are those who feel the proposal should be abandoned completely for policy that might include a greater reliance on renewable fuels. Missouri Farm Bureau President Charlie Kruse says cap and trade is not the right response to climate change.

“We need to scrape this thing and start over and start making ourselves more energy-independent,” said Kruse following a session during the convention, “and that means more of our own oil, coal, nuclear, wind, solar and of course including biofuels.”

American Farm Bureau delegates cited recent developments as reasons to re-emphasize their opposition. As an example, they maintain that e-mails recently made public call into question the science behind climate change and demonstrate an unwillingness to consider opposing views.