No matter who you ask, it's been a busy week in agriculture, for good and for bad.
The first news came from the Bush Administration's EPA, which last Friday
released a long-awaited new rule on water waste discharges from large feedlots. The new rule is intended to regulate the pollutants that contained animal feeding operations (aka "CAFOs" or "factory farms") can release into the water.
The new feedlot rules will require permits for any CAFO that releases waste into water supplies, and companies running those feedlots will need to have a plan to manage the nutrients and waste that will run off into the water supply.
"This clean water rule strengthens environmental safeguards by embracing a zero discharge standard and requiring site-specific management plans to prevent runoff of excess nutrients into our nation’s waters," Benjamin H. Grumbles, the EPA's Assistant Administrator for Water, said in a press statement.
And in
another press statement, the National Pork Producer Council called the rule "tough but fair."
That alone should be enough to raise one's eyebrows.
While the EPA is touting the rule as making more feedlots take charge of their waste, environmental groups are calling the regulation a sham. The Natural Resources Defense Council said that it
creates a loophole that allows feedlot operators to simply state they do not discharge any waste, and thus don't need a permit.
Furthermore, the NRDC says that by claiming no discharges, CAFOs will avoid enforcement because regulators won't look any deeper than whether or not a feedlot admits to discharging waste into the water.
Jeffrey Odefey, a staff attorney at the Waterkeeper Alliance, told
ENS Newswire that the rule is "an unworkable muddle." Others are linking the new rule to last-ditch efforts by the Bush administration to
pass business-friendly and environment-unfriendly regulations in its last months in office.
Not all is dark and gloomy on the farm front, though: On Tuesday, California voters passed by a wide margin Proposition 2, which would require CAFOs to use cages and pens large enough to allow egg-laying hens, veal cows and pigs to stand, turn around and lie down comfortably.
Predictably, members of the agriculture industry reacted with gloom and doom; an article on
Farm Futures.com warned that the measure, which goes into effect in just over six years, "closes down the California egg industry -- affecting 95% of the state's egg production and forcing California consumers to buy eggs from other states and from Mexico."
Aside from politics, our neighbors at the Sustainable Industries Journal reported last week on a project in the Pacific Northwest that
aims to bring small farms into the growing demand for agricultural waste-to-energy plants.
Farm Power Northwest has broken ground on its first anaerobic waste digester, a project that will bring manure from small farms in the Mount Vernon, Wash., area to create electricity from the methane released by animal waste. Farm Power will sell this energy back to the Puget Sound electrical grid and use the proceeds to pay for the plant and expand to build other plants in the region.
Greening the ag industry in many ways parallels the larger move toward greening mainstream businesses: You're looking at a handful of big players, or more often large companies that serve as conglomerates of much smaller players, and a nearly unfathomable number of smaller businesses. There is a certain overlap in the two groups' political desires, but it's not a homogeneous group by any stretch.
Although it seems that many of the big players and industry groups are often in a holding pattern against new regulations or changes to well-established business practices, there are a growing number of innovators who are looking at their operations from a new perspective and seeing the financial as well as environmental benefits to bringing green to the business.
