Good News: NCGA Testimony in New York Times
Posted: April 30, 2009
The New York Times has a Business-section story on NCGA’s Washington testimony yesterday on pending climate change legislation.
Fred Yoder of the National Corn Growers Association said carbon caps would likely cause increased input costs for farmers. Fertilizer prices — which track the cost of oil and natural gas and have seen major increases over the past year — could go up even more under a climate bill, he said.
“Our costs are going to go up even if agriculture remains an uncapped entity — we will be profoundly impacted by everyone else’s carbon,” Yoder said. “Really what we are looking for is an offset to bring back some of those extra costs.”
The potential boon for farmers in climate legislation would be if they could get payments for their conservation efforts to trap greenhouse gas emissions. Farm groups are calling on Congress to give agriculture a significant portion of offsets in the bill.
“It scares all farmers about viability,” Yoder told the panel. “If we’re going to go down this road, we have to have some kind of mechanism to offset costs.”
