Climate Change Legislation

Climate Change Legislation. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

Climate change legislation has a lot of people scratching their heads as to whether it’s a good thing or bad and there is a lot of misinformation going around.

KOLSRUD: The climate change legislation bill passed the House here earlier this year and I think you are exactly right, nobody knows exactly what’s in it or how it’s going to affect them and you hear all kinds of things but I have taken it on myself to look at it as an opportunity and see what’s all in there and in reality this climate change legislation that passed the House is very straight forward from the fact that it does want to actually address some of these climate change issues which a lot of other countries in the world have already done.

Dave Kolsrud is a farmer, consultant and renewable energy developer who lives in South Dakota and works with farming operations throughout the Midwest. He says that as far as he can see it, farming is a big part of the solution.

KOLSRUD: In agriculture we are quite unique from the fact that we have a lot of land base, a lot of areas and livestock and with our soil and the way we farm and the way we till the soil, we’re actually a huge part of the solution and we need to capitalize on that.

If all goes as planned it should develop a money stream from the manufacturing and big business side to the rural side.

KOLSRUD: But the part that exited me the most is the fact that we as farmers and out in the rural areas are quite innovative and we’re the whole new wave of energy coming whether it’s methane digesters on livestock farms, we can do with smart grid technology – we can be putting in smaller wind turbines and doing net metering, we can actually be investing together as cooperatives which we already have the model we’ve done owning larger wind farms and getting the offsets and getting other revenue streams rather than just renting our land out.

Kolsrud is adamant that this will allow troubled ag industries to move through some of the troubling times.

KOLSRUD: This climate change legislation to me can have as great an impact on rural America literally as the Homestead Act did back in 1862. It allows people to be innovative and live on the land and create their own energy and have another market to sell especially right now with the livestock industry suffering and the dairy industry suffering, if they had the ability to sell another product off their farms they could actually flow through some of these highs and lows of these market cycles that have been rather traumatic over the last few years.

For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

www.harvestcleanenergy.org