To quote Dennis,
“This is what I’m on about!”
The Washington Post had this article about the way big farms resist facing the true costs of their industrial agriculture model. They want the public to pay the external cost for their economies of scale.
Some excerpts:
This summer, the state Air Resources Board ruled that any existing farm with more than 1,000 milk cows had to apply for a permit on the grounds that dairies — which release volatile organic compounds and ammonia — rank as major polluters. Volatile organic compounds create smog when combined with nitrogen oxide, while ammonia reacts with that smog to form fine-particle pollution.
Dairy farmers have assailed the science underlying the rules and blocked a plan that would have made them install technology to capture methane and other gases that cows emit.
“We’re not convinced our cows are worse than all the cars and trucks in the world,” said Michael Marsh, who heads Western United Dairymen, which represents just over half of the area’s 1,900 dairy farmers. Marsh estimates that installing manure digesters could cost the industry $1 billion. “If we’re going to have this kind of mandate, how are we going to pay for it?” he asked.
Tom Mendes’s family has been dairy farming in California’s Central Valley for three generations, ever since his grandfather arrived from Portugal. But Mendes has told his 19-year-old son not to follow him into what he calls a dying way of life.
Smallholder note: Perhaps the Mendes family should consider grass-based dairying. There are many families making a living with a lot less land and fraction of the cows. Without polluting or externalizing other costs to their neighbors.
Residents have formed a citizens’ group to fight large dairy producers. Tom Frantz, a Shafter native who heads the Association of Irritated Residents, said area farms are “like a factory in your midst.”
“We’re really irritated because our lungs are being used as an agricultural subsidy,” said Frantz, who has asthma. His group notified farmer Rick Vanderham this month that residents plan to sue him for building a new 2,800-cow dairy without a Clean Air Act permit.
California’s debate is not unique: Public health advocates in states includingNorth Carolina and Iowa have pushed to regulate hog, poultry and dairy farms — known as “confined animal feeding operations” — with varying degrees of success.
In the Washington area, farms account for more than 30 percent of the pollutants that cause “dead zones” in the Chesapeake Bay — where algae blooms deplete the oxygen, and fish and crabs cannot breathe. Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania have all tried to make farmers reduce the amount of fertilizer and manure washing off their fields.
God forbid that the polluters be stopped from passing on their pollution to the commons!
Large-scale livestock farms have mushroomed in recent decades — 5 percent of U.S. farms now account for 54 percent of beef and dairy cattle, according to the Agriculture Department — presenting a new challenge to regulators. Environmental Protection Agency officials began investigating the massive operations in the mid-1990s after nearby residents complained of respiratory and eye problems.
The government scored some initial wins: Missouri-based Premium Standard Farms agreed to monitor emissions at its hog farms in 1999, and the company has spent $9.5 million on technology that converts hog waste and emissions into commercial dry fertilizer. But Bush administration officials ordered the EPA to stop investigating farm emissions in 2001.
Last month, the administration struck a deal with more than 2,700 livestock firms, exempting them from prosecution for air pollution violations until mid-2008 while the agency researches the issue. Each firm must contribute $2,500 to help fund a study of two dozen livestock operations and pay a penalty on a sliding scale to address past violations.
“What the agency is trying to do is figure out the best way to get the most information, in a comprehensive way, in the most expeditious manner to determine if a problem may exist,” said Jon Scholl, counselor to the EPA administrator for agriculture policy.
David Townsend, Premium Standard’s vice president for environmental affairs, and other industry officials praised the deal, saying, “You have to have some reasonable data to say where [the industry] needs to go.”
Environmentalists, on the other hand, assailed the pact as an industry giveaway. Aloma Dew, a Sierra Club organizer in Kentucky who monitors poultry farms, said: “It’s not just a stink that’s coming out of these farms. It’s a real health threat.”
The Maximum Leader posted a link to an excellent essay concluding that, while Democrats are delusional, Republican politicians are liars. If Bush really believed in the market, he would accept the fact that the internalization of costs is neccessary for an efficient economy. He would support the entrepreneurial little guy and not the largest 5% of farms. He has continued subsidy programs that DO NOT help small farms - instead dooming them by continuing the public subsidization of the “get big” mentality that keeps farm prices “low” (See my previous post), reducing the amount of money that small farmers can earn from their smaller production. Good golly, but it makes me want to be a Libertarian!
Repeat after me:
Subsidies and environmental exemptions do NOT save the family farm. They force the public to pay for an inefficient economic model: factory farms.
If you get the government out, sanity will return to the agricultural market place and farmers with a will to survive will.
