Agricultural community struggles to deal with climate change legislation

Agriculture Online: Climate change legislation remains a top goal of the Obama Administration, and the groups that lobby for farmers and ranchers in Washington are having a tough time dealing with it. Even though California Congressman Henry Waxman is struggling to find enough fellow Democrats in his Energy and Commerce Committee to get a bill written by his goal of Memorial Day, other members of the House expect that chamber of Congress to pass some form of legislation this year.

When President Barack Obama visited a factory that makes wind generator towers Newton, Iowa on earth day, he made another pitch for a climate change bill. "Now there's been some debate about this whole climate change issue, but it's serious," Obama said.

Iowa Congressman Leonard Boswell, who was at the event, told Agriculture Online that he expects the House to pass a climate change bill. "I wouldn't be surprised," he said. "It's going to be debated and discussed – amended. That's what we do." But it's a priority in the House, he said.

Boswell isn't on Waxman's committee. He's on the House Agriculture Committee. And he's a member of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition of Democrats, a group that has been skeptical about the potential costs to the economy and rural areas from a bill that aims to lower the use of gasoline and coal over time.

Facing that sense of inevitability, 19 key producer groups held a closed-door "commodity roundtable" on Wednesday that devoted a half-day to discussing the issue and debating different approaches. Some groups favor opposing both climate change legislation and any effort that the Environmental Protection Agency might take to lower greenhouse gas emissions through regulations. Others favor working with Waxman to get the most favorable bill for agriculture, one that would allow for trading of carbon credits that would reward farmers for using no-till or installing methane digesters in livestock operations, for example.

…The cost to farmers of cap and trade remains a big issue. "Nobody in the agriculture community disputes that fuel costs and fertilizer costs will increase," Ziegler Thomas said....

A farm in Green County, Wisconsin