Obama's Farm Team
Members of the Obama Administration have embarked on a "listening tour" in rural America this summer, but let's hope the visits involve more than listening. This is a moment for the Administration's top officials to engage farmers, ranchers and rural residents in a robust exchange of ideas about their role in a new American economy.
That role seems as obvious as it is dynamic. The "clean energy economy" President Obama advocates can revitalize the nation's long-neglected rural communities. Many of them can become the epicenters of sustainable energy production in the U.S., as well as our principal providers of carbon sequestration services.
In his climate and energy policies, Obama is sowing the seeds for that new era of rural prosperity, but it will be up to rural America to bring in the harvest.
Federal ethanol subsidies seem to be getting all the attention from the farm lobby, but ethanol feedstocks (make that cellulosic) are just one of the new crops that will power America in the years ahead. In parts of the United States, landowners already are making thousands of dollars a year in lease payments to host wind turbines on their fields. Each turbine occupies a very small footprint, which allows farmers and ranchers to continue cropping or grazing the land. That makes wind a very lucrative crop as well as a source of new property tax revenues for rural communities. According to the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory:
"There is a bright spot on the rural economic development horizon: wind. In fact, achieving the goals of the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind Powering America program during the next 20 years will create $60 billion in capital investment in rural America, provide $1.2 billion in new income for farmers and rural landowners, and create 80,000 new jobs..."
Wind energy offers rural landowners a new cash crop. Although leasing arrangements vary widely, royalties are typically around $2,000 per year for a 750-kilowatt wind turbine or 2% to 3% of the project's gross revenues. Given typical wind turbine spacing requirements, a 250-acre farm could increase annual farm income by $14,000 per year, or more than $55 per acre. In a good year, that same plot of land might yield $90 worth of corn, $40 worth of wheat, and $5 worth of beef." (Blogger's note: This report and its numbers are 5 years old. I've heard of lease payments of $5,000 per turbine.)
More than a billion dollars in new income is not loose change; it's change farmers and rural communities can believe in.
Solar farms can be next, along with locally owned bio-refineries that turn agricultural and urban wastes into fuel and a variety of other consumer products. By harvesting methane gas from animal feedlots and local landfills, farms and rural communities can obtain renewable energy while preventing one of the most potent of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere. (Methane's heat-trapping properties are more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.)
Tomorrow's farms will earn new income from dedicated energy crops such as switchgrass and other perennials and from non-food crops that can be turned into a wide variety of products now obtained from petroleum, ranging from cosmetics to road de-icers and biodegradable plastic bags.
In a robust carbon market, farmers also will earn money by managing their woodlands for carbon sequestration and by using low-carbon tillage methods.
Meantime, farmers must begin practicing sustainable agriculture to restore and preserve our soils, water and forests. This is an area rich for discussion as Obama's team makes its rural visits. It means fundamental changes in farm policy, including federal subsidies that encourage crop diversity. It implies much more careful management of fertilizers to keep them out of waterways and much better management of nitrogen, itself a greenhouse gas. It means more efficient irrigation, the use of less-thirsty crops and the preservation of wetlands to help protect water supplies.
National farm policy must begin to resolve the conflicts between food, fiber and energy crops, as well as water conflicts between rural, urban and traditional energy production.
While members of the farm team are on the road, they might take along a copy of the Presidential Climate Action Plan's chapter on sustainable agriculture. It details several changes in federal policy that would help rural farms and communities lead America's transition to a new energy economy - changes such as focusing rural electrification and economic development subsidies to capitalize rural renewable energy development and extending electric transmission lines to rural areas with good wind and solar resources.
Before it heads back to Washington, the Obama team should pay a visit to the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and listen to Wes Jackson. Wes is one of the country's apostles of sustainable agriculture. He proposes that we have a forward-looking 50-year farm bill rather than making policy by tweaking the law every five years in reauthorization bills.
The Land Institute has held its own "listening tours" from coast to coast with farmers and experts in sustainable agriculture. Jackson and the Institute propose fundamental, systemic change in national farm policy. As the Institute puts it:
"Our vision is predicated on the need to end the ecological damage to agricultural land associated with grain production - damages such as soil erosion, poisoning by pesticides and biodiversity loss. The most cost-effective way to do so and stay fed is the perennialized the landscape. The transition of agriculture from an extractive to a renewable economy in the foreseeable future can now be realistically imagined...We have little doubt that we can make the agricultural transition faster than the adjustments imposed upon us by climate change and the end of the fossil fuel era."
That brings up two other huge farm issues: global climate change and national energy policy. Agriculture will be one of the sectors most affected by changes in precipitation and temperatures and by the spread of pests that affect crop production. It also is heavily dependent today on fossil fuels whose prices will rise when Congress puts a price on carbon.
If Obama's farm team is ready to talk about these issues - the pressing as well as the promising - it wasn't evident in the Administration's announcement of the rural listening tour. In a sound bite that could only have been written by a staffer with no license for boldness, the White House quoted President Obama explaining the listening tour this way: "A healthy American economy depends on a prosperous rural America."
That may turn out to be the most obvious understatement of Obama's first year in office. In fact, our ability to build and sustain a healthy economy has everything to do with the health of our soils, woodlands and water supplies and with the renewable energy resources available in rural America. As every good farmer knows, you can't achieve prosperity if you leave good crops unharvested (in this case solar, wind and biomass energy), if you deplete the natural resources on which your livelihood depends, or if you fail to plan for the weather (in this case, climate change).
Rural America and the Obama team have a lot to talk about. The team should indeed listen on this tour, but on all of these important topics it shouldn't be shy about starting the conversation.
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Farmers need to run their tractors on hydrogen produced on site via a solar hydrogen fuel cell system. There is way too much oil and gas used today to farm. Biofuels are good up to a point but are limited Fuel cells solar power, hydrogen have no liits and are very good on the environment.
I have an even simpler, more doable suggestion: (Gradually) discontinue all agricultural subsidies, and allow farmers to grow industrial hemp. (Which is protein-rich and biomass rich and which requires little in the way of water, fertilizer and pesticides.)
Well you've made points concerning agriculture but you're thin on the ranching half. Most of my Colorado neighbors ranch grass-fed Black Angus, others run horses. I breed Alpacas for their fiber. Alpacas are modified ruminants with a three chamber stomach; far more efficient than the seven stomach bovine system. They produce little methane and I feed 12 adults on what a horse consumes daily. They don't rip forage by the root like sheep or goats so pastures recover quickly. A properly managed Alpaca produces 15 to 20 TIMES the amount of ultra-fine fiber as a cashmere goat and some day I'll match that in all of the Alpacas' 22 natural colors (no chemical dyes). Alpaca fiber is so fine (16-20 microns AFD) that it does not itch like sheep wool and can be worn next to the skin. It has no lanolin and is hypoallergenic. It's a far greener fiber production process than polyester or even conventionally grown cotton. It seems to me that even a small percentage of cattle ranches (we should all eat less meat anyway) were to move to breeding Alpacas for domestic fiber production we'd be making progress in a lot of different directions at once.
Ever seen an old-fashioned windmill in a field? Those who complain about aesthetics should remember that wind was once used to draw water from a well. We need to wait and see how it all shakes down b4 we start complaining.
Those who complain about aesthetics must prefer to see everything through a brown smog haze.
We can fill fields with windmills made by GE. Big win for the rural folks. Never mind their fuel costs double and utilities go up 4X.
Are you quoting talking points or just making this up as you go along?
Didn't he just appoint a guy from Monsanto? We will never see hemp legalization.
bingo
Yes, former Monsanto Executive Michael Taylor. Who has gone back and forth between goverment regulatory agencies and the companies he was charged with regulating. This practise should be outlawed.
Here's an inconvenient truth: we rural people don't want to be industrial power plants for urban gluttons, and since there is more than enough existing rooftops within the built environment to power 100% of the US' electricity needs (per the DOE) using super cheap thin film PV, we don't intend to be.
the built environment is the problem and the solution. each structure needs to get as close to net zero as possible, and then many of us in our rural, low-power-sucking homes can sell power into the grid from our roofs (homes and outbuildings) if people like you will start promoting feed in tariffs and stop promoting wholesale industrialization of our nation's beautiful open spaces.
we don't want your stinkin' broken down, inefficient industrial turbines that use 33 truckloads of cement for each base and thousands of tons of steel (yeah, cement and steel are so green!) and your SF6-spewing transmission. you think methane is bad, you should listen to the EPA when they explain that SF6 (80% of which is used in electrical transmission) is not sequestered by anything, has a half-life of 3200 years and is 24000 times as harmful as CO2 in global warming...
in other words, your plan will enrich Big Energy and will destroy ecosystems, economies, and increase global warming. my plan will reduce power usage, stabilize the grid, improve property values, democratize power production (and payments) - all without forcing families from their homes or destroying our beautiful country.
Wow. Denial is beautiful eh?
Good thing your "we" means you and one other guy you know.
Agreed, It seems to be working out just find in Europe. "American Exceptionalism" has taken on a new meaning and not a good one.
Raising the bar for the environment by practicing sustainable agriculture to restore and preserve our soils, water and forests.... additionally provides a real opportunity for raising the bar for human health.
Bill Couzens Founder Less Cancer
This recession is ongoing from 2007. It is based on the Bush policies. That's a fact.
Farmers have been practicing sustainable agriculture for years and literally billions have been spent preserving and restoring soils, waters and forests so there is no way you can pawn that off as a new idea.
It is also a lot more than just farmers having a say in wind farms. In many areas there is a great resistance to not destroy the viewscape and strict restrictions are being implemented to restrict any wind farms.
Also the Obama team needs to also take the advise from the quote "As every good farmer knows, you can't achieve prosperity if you leave good crops unharvested" in that not all rural areas are suitable for wind farms because the wind doesn't blow equally everywhere. Don't waste money trying to develop wind or solar power where it isn't really sustainable. I don't think anyone wants to see rural America totally covered in wind turbines and solar panels.
Well, we need not worry that Obama is not a man of action. Well over 2 million job losses on his watch, and he decides we need to discuss things.
And nothing to say about Bush, where this all began? And you expect Obama to turn it all around in six months?
Seems like nothing more than Obama bashing to me.
How long can you use the Bush excuse? I thought Obama was omnipotent? And the Dems have had Congress for how long? Remember any of the 2006 promises? Are we still making excuses? Words are cheap, results are MIA.
You Republicans put this plane into a probable fatal nose dive and are blaming the guy who has grabbed the controls to try to save it for the impending crash. Your ignorance and denial is what got us into this and is what is keeping us from really turning things around.
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