By SUSAN BLOWER
Indiana Correspondent

ANDERSON, Ind. — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s policies toward agriculture indicate the bureau doesn’t understand how modern agriculture works, said Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) last week during a visit to Madison and Delaware counties.

“I have very considerable concerns with the EPA’s desire to enforce a number of laws,” Lugar said. “The alarm started with cap-and-trade; and the EPA threatened that if (Congress doesn’t) pass cap-and-trade, EPA would enforce certain rules through the Clean Air Act.”

The EPA’s more strict enforcement policy was detailed by EPA Director Lisa Jackson during last summer’s Congressional session.
According to the EPA, cap-and-trade is a market-based policy tool that puts a mandatory cap on air pollution emission levels while providing the sources of these emissions flexibility in how they comply. The government sets the cap emission levels and monitors those companies that generate the pollution. Companies that produce less than the allowed emission level may sell the balance of their emission credit to companies that will exceed the mandated cap levels.

Cap-and-trade supporters claim that growers will earn income by practicing carbon-sequestering farm techniques and trading carbon credits to companies that can’t meet government-determined restrictions on CO2 emissions. Opponents, like Lugar, believe cap-and-trade will drive higher the cost to produce a crop.

The proposal stalled in Congress earlier this year.

He mentioned that federal regulation of farm dust under the Clean Air Act has been on the radar for his farmer-constituents. “I was in Kokomo in a town meeting at McDonald’s, and I was approached by four people who were concerned about the farm dust regulation,” Lugar said, indicating the level of concern by farmers.

The Clean Air Act protects the atmosphere by regulating practices by businesses. In early August Lugar wrote to Jackson asking her to have “common sense” in regulating farm dust. His concern and that of many farm leaders was based on a July draft policy of the EPA that potentially laid the foundation for stringent regulation of dust.

“As a Hoosier farmer, I understand and appreciate that many agriculturally based processes associated with tillage, harvesting and transporting grains and forages, raising livestock, and agronomic input applications can generate dust,” Lugar wrote Jackson.

Lugar was also critical of EPA’s interpretation of enforcing the Clean Water Act. “There was the revival of the idea that certain fertilizers endanger water systems ... which alarmed the chemical industry and farmers,” he said.

EPA and ethanol

Lugar also suspects that the EPA does not support the corn ethanol industry, which he believes is the “only alternative energy (source) that we produce in any practical quantity.”

He also thinks the oil industry campaigns against the expansion of ethanol. He said the biggest problem facing ethanol is distribution.
The proposed ethanol pipeline could work, Lugar said, but “it would take some doing. The appropriations bill is bogged down” in committee.

Lugar was in Anderson on Oct. 19 to celebrate the opening of the Flagship Enterprise building, which is designed to promote start-up businesses. He later headed to Muncie to promote a statewide food drive, benefitting food banks and local pantries with donations from private citizens and grocers Walmart, Kroger and Marsh.

Lugar is the senior Republican in the Senate and is the longest-serving Congressman in Indiana history. Still, he manages his 604-acre farm in Marion County.

“On our farm, I’m happy to report that we got 70-bushel (per acre) corn and 48-bushel beans. At the current prices, I’m pretty happy with that,” he told Farm World.