Tag: Farms

Solar Developments Are Spreading Across America, Threatening Farmers and Local Communities

Just the News
Solar Farm

Fueled by massive federal subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), solar developers are looking to the wide open spaces of rural lands as the best places to site their projects. This is also where much of America’s farm and range land is located, as well as communities that like the existing look and character of their neighborhoods.

Last week, President Biden said of the IRA, “I’m proud to announce that my, uh, my investments, that through my investments, the most significant climate change law ever. And by the way, it is a $369 billion bill. It’s called the — uh, we, we should have named it what it was.”

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Pennsylvania Set to Receive $4 Million for Rural ‘Renewable Energy’ Projects

The Center Square

On the heels of $22 million in federal cash for energy efficiency projects, Pennsylvania will get another $4 million more.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that $3.6 million will support another 30 projects for efficiency upgrades and renewable energy projects “to lower energy costs, generate new income, and strengthen the resiliency of their operations in rural Pennsylvania.”

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Big Ag Set to Crush Family Farmers with ‘Climate-Smart’ Carbon Markets: Report

The Center Square

Family scale farmers in the Midwest may lose a lot to large agribusinesses through carbon markets, a new report says.

According to the report, “Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab” by Open Markets Institute and Friends of the Earth, carbon markets programs will entrench chemical-intensive farming practices and increase corporate control of agriculture rather than reduce greenhouse gas emissions like politicians assert.

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Three Ohio School Districts Take Part in Pilot Program to Teach Students About Where Their Food Is Grown

Hannah Poling

Three local school districts in Ohio are teaching students about where the food they eat at school is grown, as well as adding to the overall menu variety, as part of a pilot program through Feed Our Future’s Local Menu Takeover.

This pilot program started last year in Northeast Ohio, and this year, three Cincinnati school districts have committed to serving only locally sourced meals this week as part of Farm to School Month.

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Wisconsin Gov. Evers Signs Bill Appropriating $883K to Promoting Dairy Exports

The Center Square
Gov. Tony Evers

Wisconsin taxpayers will pay $883,000 for a new agricultural exports program to promote dairy products.

The tab results from a bill signed by Gov. Tony Evers on Tuesday, which was National Agriculture Day.

Wisconsin Act 207 (Senate Bill 827) requires the Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection to apply the existing, unused appropriation for a newly created agricultural exports program.

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Commentary: It’s an Unraveling, Not a Reset

Admin

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that a shortage of fertilizer is causing farms in the developing world to fail, threatening food shortages and hunger. Ironically, the lead photo is of mounds of phosphate fertilizer in a Russian warehouse.

Modern synthetic fertilizers are typically made using natural gas or from phosphorous-bearing ores. The former provides the nitrogen that is critical to re-use of fields in commercial agriculture. They constitute more than half of all synthetic fertilizer production. 

So what happens when oil and natural gas extraction are crippled in industrialized nations? One likely outcome is that the fertilizer manufacturing industry is also crippled, leaving both large commercial growers and smaller farms around the world starved of a key substance they need to grow food for hungry populations.

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Farms Fail as Fertilizer Prices Soar

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Blue tractor in a field, fertilizing the land

Soaring fertilizer prices across the globe have impacted farmers making it more expensive to produce food and forcing them to cut back on production, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Diammonium phosphate, or DAP, a common component of fertilizer, cost $745 per metric ton in December 2021, more than double its average 2020 price, the WSJ reported.

Higher fertilizer costs could translate into increased food prices in the next year, worsening global hunger after the pandemic caused massive job losses and further growing inflation, the WSJ reported.

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Grant Applications Open for Michigan Farms, Agriculture Processors to Offset Coronavirus Impact

Jordyn Pair

Applications are now open for $15 million in grants for Michigan farms and agricultural processors to offset damage done by the coronavirus pandemic, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development announced on Wednesday.

The Michigan Agricultural Safety Grant Program will allocate $15 million from funding from the federal CARES Act to farms and agricultural processors, with $10 million being provided to processors and $5 million provided to farms.

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Commentary: Remembering the Way Farming Used to Be

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by Victor Davis Hanson   Almost all the pragmatic agricultural wisdom that my grandparents taught me has long ago been superseded by technology. I don’t anymore calibrate, as I once did when farming in the 1980s, the trajectory of an incoming late summer storm by watching the patterns of nesting birds, or the shifting directions and feel of the wind, or the calendar date or the phases of the moon. Instead, I go online and consult radar photos of storms far out at sea. Meteorology is mostly an exact science now. Even the agrarian’s socio-scientific arts of observation that I learned from my family are seldom employed in my farming anymore. Back in the day, when a local farmer’s wife died, I was told things like, “Elmer will go pretty soon, too. His color isn’t good and he’s not used to living without her”—and tragically the neighbor usually died within months. Now I guess I would ask Elmer whether his blood tests came back OK, and the sort of blood pressure medicine he takes. I don’t think we believe that superficial facial color supersedes lab work. Farmers did because in an age of limited technology they saw people as plants,…

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Commentary: Midwestern Values May We Never Lose Them

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by Henry I. Miller   I spent nearly a week in June in the flyover part of the country—Topeka, Kansas, to be exact—and found it to be a refreshing change. There’s noticeably less snark, whining, self-entitlement, and virtue signaling there than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live and work. Several of the friends I visited come from farm families, although none has followed that occupation. One is a highly successful lawyer and the former head of Kansas’s tax agency, another is a financial adviser, while another became a bank president. A fourth became an eminent psychiatrist and then took over his father’s banking business, but all have retained the small-town Midwestern values that were described movingly by Purdue University President Mitch Daniels and former Indiana governor in a recent Washington Post op-ed: During a decade in elected office in Indiana, I made it my practice while traveling the state to stay overnight in Hoosier homes rather than hotels. Because of geography and, candidly, personal choice, probably a third of those 125 overnights were with farm families. There I witnessed virtues that one sees too rarely these days—hard work, practical manual skill, a communitarian ethic—woven tightly into the…

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