USDA

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has promised to more strictly regulate coal ash, but it's still promoting use of the toxic waste on food crops as a soil amendment.

This month, the EPA and U.S. Department of Agriculture enter the final year of a three-year partnership that's part of a larger effort by the American Coal Ash Association, the Electric Power Research Institute and others to "promote appropriate increased use of" coal ash in agriculture, according to documents released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The agencies say coal ash can improve the texture and fertility of soil, but environmental advocates raises concerns about its toxic elements. Created by the burning of coal for power, coal ash contains contaminants including arsenic, lead and mercury.

"USDA should pull out of the coal ash business tomorrow morning," says PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, who obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. "USDA does American agriculture no favors by duping farmers into spreading hazardous wastes across their fields."

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• Sue Sturgis's blog
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I’ve said it before: There is a quick, painless way to immediately cut global greenhouse gas emissions – reduce beef consumption. Livestock production is responsible for 18 percent of global GHGs, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Cutting most of that takes a simple lifestyle change, nothing more.

Apparently, Sens. John Thune of South Dakota and Chuck Schumer of New York missed that memo – as well as President Obama’s directive that science must guide government decisions involving, among other things, “mitigation of the threat of climate change.”

The logical conclusion for anyone looking at the science would be to create policies that pare down beef consumption. Instead, Thune and Schumer introduced Senate Bill 527, which would bar the government from creating a “cow tax” that would effectively tax GHG emissions from livestock.

Part II of a two-part series on the USDA farm census

The latest U.S. Department of Agriculture farm census reveals two patterns of development in the agricultural sector. One is the praiseworthy increase in the number of small farms that we discussed in Part I. The other is a pernicious increase in the number of big farms.

The census showed that about 6 percent of the nation's farms produce 70 percent of its food. From a different angle, farms with more than $1 million in sales produced 59 percent of the nation’s food in 2007, up from 47 percent in 2002.

So despite the countervailing trend of small farms, our food production system is still a concentrated, industrial food production system. And that means an emission-spewing food production system.

Here’s why:

Part I of a two-part series on the USDA farm census

The U.S. Department of Agriculture just published its latest census of the nation’s agricultural sector, and it included some strikingly good news. The number of farms, particularly small farms, is increasing, reversing a decades-long trend lamented by agrarian writer Wendell Berry as “The Unsettling of America.”

The census, conducted every five years, showed a sizable jump in the total number of farms—2,204,792 farms in all, 4 percent more than in 2002. It also found a sharp up-tick in the number of micro-farms, those with sales of less than $1,000—from 580,000 to close to 700,000. Farms that small are not chiefly commercial enterprises. They typically feed their owners, and perhaps contribute on a very small scale to local markets.

While this year’s survey made a greater effort to count small farms, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack observed: “I don't think it's just a statistical anomaly that smaller farms have increased in number.” He said much of the growth was likely the result of efforts to promote organic farming and improve per-acre productivity.

Indeed, the sector with the largest growth in percentage and absolute terms was farms with less than 50 acres.

But wait, you say: “What does that have to do with global warming or containing emissions?”