Farm Bureau rallies members against climate bill; environmental group hopes to refute FB claims

The American Farm Bureau Federation has recently launched a campaign called "Don't Cap Our Future" to mobilize members against cap-and-trade legislation. AFB President Bob Stallman writes in the lobbying group's Ag Agenda: "Legislation would impose higher energy and food costs on consumers, raise fuel, fertilizer and energy costs for farmers and ranchers, and shrink the American agricultural sector, resulting in reduced U.S. food production."

Stallman says that cap-and-trade legislation would cost Americans roughly $2,300 per household per year. Government incentives for farmers who grow trees to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will put as much as 17 percent of U.S. agricultural land in trees, Stallman writes, causing food prices to rise by as much as $33 billion annually. Farm Bureau is encouraging members to personally deliver farm caps with their signatures on the bill to members of Congress to show their opposition to the legislation. (Read more)

In response, the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit skeptical of corporate agriculture, has issued a new report hoping to disprove many of the accusations. The authors say farmers should not be as concerned about the cost of legislation to limit climate change as the cost of climate change to U.S. agriculture. "Unless action is taken now to slow global warming, farmers can expect to see an acceleration of the extreme weather patterns, heavy rains, flooding, droughts and higher temperatures that have already taken a heavy toll on US agriculture over the past two decades," EWG says in a news release.

EWG says economists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have concluded the costs of a climate bill are so small they can't be considered threats to farm income and will be lost in the year-to-year swings in farm income due to other factors. Between 2012 and 2018 they project costs will increase by 45 cents per acre for soybeans, 66 cents per acre for wheat, and $1.19 per acre for corn, under half of one percent of current per acre production costs for these crops. EWG writes that farmers can expect only a 0.3 percent raise for cotton and a 0.6 percent raise for rice. (Read more)