Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/tag/climate-change/)
A collection of original and curated stories, reports and resources on climate change and agribusiness
Big Ag must have breathed a huge collective sigh of relief when President-elect Joe Biden tapped Tom Vilsack to be secretary of USDA. For Big Ag Vilsack is like your grandfather's favorite slippers – comfortable, cuddley warm, and dependable.
OK...it's once again time for your audacious commentator to give his hot takes on the agriculture stories that will make news in 2021. This year I've enlisted the help of Homer Simpson who truly knows something about predicting agricultural events before they happened (witness the Simpson take on a horsemeat scandal and the invention of the “tomacco plant”).
In the history of our planet there have been five previous major mass extinctions. Now there's a sixth mass extinction brewing.... the Holocene extinction. The Holocene is comparable in scope to the one that wiped T-Rex and all his dinosaur brethern off the face of the earth. Until recently a majority of the public had no idea about the ticking time bomb in their midst.
It’s no secret to anyone paying attention that the POTUS is the nation’s science and climate change denier-in-chief. It’s a given undisputed fact at this point. But sometimes behind the scene what government does compared to what the POTUS says are two vastly different things. Four years ago the 2016 Republican Party Platform was crystal clear when it comes to governmental action on climate change:
Based on a midyear survey, the USDA estimates there were 2.023 million farms in the nation in 2019, a tiny decline of 5,800 farms from the previous year. The change is more dramatic when the time frame is widened — there are 3% fewer farms now than there were in 2014, and the amount of farmland, 897.4 million acres, or 1.4 million square miles, fell by 1.3% during that five-year period.
Missouri agriculture officials are struggling to address a backlog of complaints from farmers who allege that dicamba-based herbicide drift from another farm has damaged their crops. The Missouri Department of Agriculture has about 600 pending pesticide investigations. Some of them date back to 2016, the year that Bayer-owned Monsanto began selling its dicamba-tolerant soybeans.
A roundup of news, reports, and research on agribusiness and related issues. Do factory farm bans have a political future? | Newfoodeconomy.com
CAFOs have long been a hot-button issue in big farming states like Iowa and North Carolina. “In Iowa, there’s been like, 15,000 new CAFOs in the last eight years or something like that,” says Bob Martin, program director of Food System Policy at the Center for a Livable Future. “And they’re continuing to intensify in North Carolina, in broiler [chicken] CAFOs on the Eastern Shore [of Maryland] … they’re kind of moving unabated,” he adds.
Despite President Trump's agriculture bailouts, Iowa farmers continue to see their financial condition erode, a cash crunch that had 44% of producers last year struggling to cover their bills, an Iowa State University report shows.
“We are watching these young farmers, beginning farmers, stemming the tide. After watching the drain of our young people leaving agriculture, this is the first sign we’ve had in quite some time—hemp is bringing people back to farming.”
The global food production system, which
includes agriculture, accounts for more than a third of manmade greenhouse
gases, according to an August report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change.
And while past focus has been on industries
such as fossil fuels and transportation, new attention is being put on
agriculture’s role in the climate change
solution. On September 18, a coalition representing 10,000 farmers and ranchers
delivered a letter to congress supporting the Green New Deal, a congressional resolution to
transition the United States to 100 percent clean energy by 2030.
Farming, more than any other industry, might be the best hope for curbing climate change.