Opinion

Opinion: Ag blazing 5 for 2019 (and beyond)

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Breaking out major prognostic tools (including an 8-ball, Ouija board, paper fortune teller and dart board...yeah we're high tech around here) here are some of the big agricultural issues on the horizon for 2019.

Agribusiness
Photo of dogs “Okie” (left), “Jenny” (middle) and “Foot” (right) at former dog breeding facility owned by Debra Pratt near New Sharon, Iowa, in this photo taken March 26, 2013, during an authorized USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service investigation.

Federal judge strikes Iowa ‘ag-gag’ Law

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A federal judge has struck down as unconstitutional a 2012 Iowa law that banned undercover recording at agricultural production facilities in the state, saying the law’s primary aim is curbing speech critical of practices at those facilities.

Government

USDA rural broadband investment tops $200 million in 2018

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The USDA has announced plans for a pilot program to bring broadband internet to all of rural America.

The plan, which Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue calls a “proof of concept,” will provide $600 million dollars in grants and loans to internet service providers to bring connection to parts of the country that are too remote, underpopulated or expensive to serve.

Agribusiness

The air they breathe
The Trump administration bowed to livestock-industry pressure, and made it harder for neighbors of CAFOs to learn what pollutants they're inhaling.

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Recent actions by the GOP-controlled Congress and the Trump administration have exempted big livestock farms from reporting air emissions. The moves follow a decade-long push by the livestock industry for exemption and leave neighbors of large-scale operations in the dark about what they’re inhaling. If that weren’t enough, environmental advocates warn that the failure to monitor those emissions makes it even harder to assess the climate effects of large-scale agriculture.

Environment
Small Iowa landfills began to close when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources began requiring stricter regulations and permits for landfills in the 1990's.

Local Town Dumps A Thing Of The Past Due To High Cost Of Government Regulations

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“See that brown building, to the left of the tree line? That’s the University of Dubuque. And a little further left, you can kind of see that little ridge, you can see it better some days, that’s the Platteville ‘M,’” John Foster, administrator for the Dubuque Metropolitan Area Regional Landfill, said, referencing the Wisconsin border-town’s landmark: a large white M on the side of a mound, by the Mississippi river. Foster was standing in Dubuque at the top of a closed landfill cell, one of nine cells the landfill has planned for the more than 600 acres around him — enough to last the Dubuque area in eastern Iowa through the century. But smaller landfills in Iowa have not fared as well as Dubuque’s the last 24 years, since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency created federal rules on issuing permits that municipal landfills have to follow.

Food for thought

Opinion: Is half a loaf of bread better than none?

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Many of my blog posts notwithstanding I root for big-agriculture.  I want them to succeed. At heart, I am a pragmatist that realizes big ag must be part of any solution to feed the world's growing population.  But having said that there are specific things I believe big ag must do as part of its corporate identity.