By Craig Cox, EWG midwest vice-president, and Nils Bruzelius, executive editor.
You hear plenty of talk about the ballooning federal deficit created by tax cuts, two wars and the effort to dig out of the economic meltdown, but precious little about the funding gap that’s hollowing out federal programs designed to protect America’s soil and water.
An economic recovery and prudent fiscal policies will...
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How threatened is Agribiz by the baby steps the Department of Agriculture has taken recently in support of organic and local agriculture? Threatened enough that one big grower personally castigated USDA Undersecretary Katherine Merrigan last month at the department’s Outlook Conference. Here’s the account that ran in the Des Moines Register:
Tim Burrack, an Arlington, Iowa, corn and soybean...
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Not so long ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did a new life-cycle analysis of corn ethanol to see if the much-subsidized biofuel meets the standard Congress set in the 2007 Energy Bill for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Producers of “renewable fuels” that reduce GHG emissions by set percentages compared to gasoline (as calculated by EPA) get a federally guaranteed market for...
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The third in AgMag’s series of looks at the Obama budget is a hopeful one. First we examined attempts by the Administration to limit the taxpayer-funded payments that ensure profits for the wealthiest farm operations. That idea was instantly stonewalled by Minnesota’s powerful Congressional delegation, which has the Minneapolis City Pages fuming.
Next AgMag sounded the alarm on Obama’s...
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By Craig Cox, Environmental Working Group Senior Vice President and manager of EWG’s Ames, Iowa, branch.
On Wednesday (Feb. 3), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) updated its Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) Rule, known as RFS 2, refusing to shift policy on one of the issues most contested by the ethanol industry, the “indirect land use change” rule. That’s technical jargon...
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