Jan Shepel
Associate Editor
MADISON
Wisconsin Farm Bureau President Bill Bruins just returned from a trip to Washington, D.C. where an official in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told him they have no intention of imposing the so-called “gas” tax on agriculture.
“Please, please tell your people we are not going to impose the gas tax,” Bruins said the official told him.
“So we’re supposed to trust you?” Bruins said he asked. “No don’t trust us,” was the response.
Jeff Lyon, director of governmental affairs for Farm Bureau, accompanied Bruins on the trip. “He was pretty emphatic about it,” he agreed.
The tax being referred to is the one American Farm Bureau has been sounding the alarm on, which would allow the EPA to regulate agriculture under the Clean Air Act and could end up imposing a fee or tax on livestock for their methane production.
Bruins and Lyons weren’t completely reassured by the official’s remarks.
On their recent capital visit, they talked with the Wisconsin congressional delegation and got a full half-hour with each of Wisconsin’s Senators — Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold. They met with the Canadian embassy to talk about trade.
Bruins said that lawmakers used to talk about billions of dollars in debts, budgets and deficits and now those numbers are in the trillions when they debate the climate change bill and health care proposal. “I can only say that there are people who are getting very concerned about these levels of spending,” he said.
A big issue for Bruins is trade. “About $1 in every $3 raised in agriculture comes from trade,” he said. “Trade accounted for $100 billion for agriculture last year and though it will be less this year, it is still important.
“We sometimes forget how important trade is,” he said. While global trade is important, two-thirds of all U.S. agricultural trade involves our North American neighbors — Canada and Mexico — and both of those trading partners have issues.
On the Mexican side there is unhappiness with the fact that trucks bringing Mexican goods to the border can’t cross it and haul the freight to its final destination. The trucks must be unloaded and re-loaded onto U.S. trucks.
“They’re ticked off about that and are putting tariffs on products from our country,” Bruins said. “And there’s no good reason for it not to get resolved.”
Trade with Canada was disrupted when the United States implemented mandatory country-of-origin labeling, so now Canada is implementing regulatory changes in retaliation. A dragging of feet by U.S. regulators has slowed any solution to the problem.
“That’s not a good way to treat our major trading partners,” Bruins said.
Since most officials agree that the Doha round of world trade negotiations is dead, bi-lateral trade agreements are considered to be the only open trading avenues, Lyon said. “There are real difficulties getting 150 or 160 countries to get together on a trade agreement, so these bi-lateral agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea are the only game in town.
Bruins noted that labor unions, which have the ear of many Democrat lawmakers, have been opposed to trade agreements, but he is concerned that if we don’t forge new agreements other countries will step into the void and take away trade that could be ours.
Lyons said another area of concern is the Clean Water Act rewrite which has some ambiguity in its language and could affect farmers. It takes the word “navigable” out of the definition of waters, he said, and might even end up affecting Wisconsin’s right-to-farm law.
The changes could increase control over all the waters of the United States and impact farming practices, he said, as well as increasing the federal government’s regulatory authority.
The men said they were also concerned about the horse slaughter issue. One bill currently circulating would make it a felony to haul a horse to slaughter. Earlier measures closed the three horse slaughter facilities that existed in the United States. Now horses to be slaughtered for human consumption must be hauled to Mexico or Canada.
As a result the number of unwanted horses in this country is growing and horse owners currently have the choice of euthanizing and then burying or cremating those horses or paying to send them to a rendering facility.
“The bill will do nothing to help with the humane treatment of horses,” Lyon said. “But it will make felons out of people hauling them.”
The Humane Society of the United States is working to get this bill passed, and Bruins believes if that happens, the organization will be emboldened to try to get other measures passed that will impact the rest of the livestock industry.
“There’s an agenda among some interest groups to do away with animal agriculture in the United States,” Bruins said.
All the officials they visited with in Washington understood the seriousness of the price picture for dairy farmers, Bruins said. “The resounding feeling was that there wasn’t a lot the government can do until supply and demand get back in balance,” he said.
Bruins said the dairy policy study which Farm Bureau lobbied for, is in the process of being conducted. When that white paper comes out, he plans to visit with Northeast states and try to pull in some Southern states to talk about major changes in federal dairy policy. The Farm Bureau’s dairy committee will be looking at the issue in August.
“I continue to believe, based on what I hear from our bankers, farmers and feed suppliers, that they’re still willing to give us credit,” Bruins said. “We’re all losing money now of course, but if our prices are still in the dumpster a year from now — that will be devastating.”
