New York Times attackes the Farm Bureau

Farm Bureau Aims to Kill Climate Bill
By Kate Galbraith
American Farm Bureau The American Farm Bureau, a large agricultural lobby, is gearing up a campaign to defeat climate legislation now pending in Congress.
The politically influential American Farm Bureau, the self-described “national voice of agriculture,” has outlined a new campaign effort to derail Congressional bills to combat climate change.
In a memo obtained Wednesday by Green Inc. and addressed to state farm bureau directors, the group’s public-relations director, Don Lipton, wrote:
Climate change bills in both the Senate and House will impact our farmers and ranchers, hit America’s consumers and impair the economy of our nation. For farmers and ranchers, it will mean higher fuel and fertilizer costs, which puts us at a competitive disadvantage in international markets with other countries that do not have similar carbon emission restrictions. For the future prosperity of the U.S. economy and American agriculture, climate change legislation must be defeated by Congress.
The authenticity of the memo was confirmed by Cody Lyon, the American Farm Bureau Federation’s director of grassroots and political advocacy.
The campaign’s slogan will be “Don’t CAP Our Future” — a play on the baseball-style caps often worn by farmers. According to the memo, state farm bureaus will get a campaign “starter kit” — including themed stickers — by early next month.
The memo urges members to place a “Don’t CAP Our Future” sticker on a farmer’s cap, sign either the sticker or the cap, and hand-deliver it to a local office of the United States Senate.
“The timing is very beneficial as many state Farm Bureau annual meetings are right around the corner,” the memo says.
Other suggested tactics include: sending messages to Senate offices; an online petition; a large banner and booths at the annual state farm bureau meetings; passing a resolution against the climate bills at state meetings; and writing opinion articles for local papers.
The American Farm Bureau’s position puts it at odds with the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who has argued that the costs of cap-and-trade to farmers will be outweighed by the benefits — from carbon offset revenues, for example.
The farm bureau has also recently campaigned against the possibility of a “cow tax” on methane emissions, which the Environmental Protection Agency has not proposed to do.

Cap and trade will harm all farms, not just the so called 'factory farms". As the owner of a small family dairy farm I understand that the current cap and trade legislation would most likely force my family out of business. If we run farms out of the US, the millions of people who depend on American farmers for food, will be forced to get food grown in other countries, countries that do not meet the rigorous environmental standards we as American farmers meet. The end result will be to increase, not decrease the "carbon footprint" of the food we eat.

I applaud the Farm Bureau for standing up and fighting for all US farms. Cap and trade is not only bad for farmers, it is bad for our environment and bad for America.

Life On our Farm

This is a video I put together for my PAL class introduction. It shows a glimpse of what our family does on a daily basis to care for our calves and cows.

Cap and Trade

The following is a presentation I used as my platform for the first PAL modual in New York City Sept. 14-17,2009.

I’m Garrick Hall, my wife and I and our five children own and operate a small dairy in northern Utah. We take pride in caring for our animals and producing high quality milk. Supporting a family on a small farm is not easy but we manage. I want to take a minute to tell you how proposed new legislation would affect my family’s dairy farm and others like us.

The Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, currently under consideration in the US Senate, is simply a tax on energy. It takes a lot of energy to run our dairy farm. It takes a lot of electricity to run the motors used to milk the cows and cool the milk. We use a lot of diesel to run the tractors used to feed and care for the animals. It gets very cold in the winter where we live so we use natural gas to heat the barn and keep things from freezing up. We have to pay freight costs to bring feed into the dairy and to haul milk out of the dairy. All these costs would increase significantly if cap and trade is implemented.

Using numbers from the Heritage Foundation, if Cap and Trade had been fully implemented in 2008, it would have cost my family over $23,000 in increased energy costs. Roughly the cost of a brand new car for my family.

My fear is that I will be left to pay these increased expenses, with little if any increased revenue. Because these expenses will only be charged to US producers, they will not have a significant effect on Climate Change; however they will put American farmers and ranchers at a disadvantage in a global market. If we increase cost to Farmers here in America without requiring the same from farmers in other countries, farm production will be driven out of the United States and food will be imported into the US. If we are truly concerned about our “carbon footprint” this should be very concerning. Farmers in many of the countries that will most likely replace the American farmer do not have to comply with the strict environmental regulations we impose here in the US. Simply put US farmers can produce more pounds of food per pound of carbon emission than farmers in most foreign countries. Forcing food production out of the US would in the end have a negative effect on carbon emissions, or increase the “carbon footprint” of the food we eat.

The bottom line is that Cap and Trade would most likely force my family along with many other livestock farmers out of business. Much of rural America is dependent on these livestock farms. From the purchasing of feed, supplies, labor, equipment, and much more, along with processing, hauling, and marketing of the products we produce. There are a tremendous number of jobs and people depending on the livestock industry. The result of Cap and Trade would be to run livestock farmers (such as myself) out of business and devastate the rural communities we support, while failing to significantly affect Climate Change.