Cattle regulations, ethanol hot topics at Northey town hall

RED OAK – Iowa’s top agriculture official discussed beef industry regulations and the expansion of the ethanol industry with local farmers in a town hall style meeting last week.

Iowa Department of Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey’s main reason for the visit was to inform local farmers about the current events and new laws that will affect agriculture.

A concern brought to Northey’s attention was the IDNR and the EPA’s role making more regulations for cattlemen disposing of waste to keep clean soil and water.

Local farmers are worried about what new regulations are on the horizon, which will make it harder for people who have less than 1,000 cattle.

Northey said the state and the IDNR are trying to take a proactive approach, making sure there are not any issues that would get the attention of the EPA.

“The concern is that cattlemen are being forced to either become a big operation, taking in 1,000 or more head, or they are being forced out of business because they simply cannot afford all of the permits and changes that would be necessary to meet their regulations,” Northey said. “The EPA seems to have small and middle-sized cattlemen in their sites.”

The state is also currently at a standstill in the passing of laws to promote bio-diesel and ethanol.

Lawmakers have not passed an extension on the bio-diesel bill that will continue the manufacturing of the fuel, which is affecting Iowa refineries.

“The funny thing is: Nobody is really against it,” Northey said. “It just hasn’t gotten done.”

With ethanol, the state is trying to increase the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline from 10 to 13 percent.

At the federal level, lawmakers are trying to target newer vehicles and would like to push the percentage to 15 percent, but Northey feels this would alienate older vehicles, and force gas stations to choose whether to use 10 or 15, due to a lack of storage tanks.

In 2009, Iowa produced 12 billion gallons of ethanol at the 10 percent blend.

Neither the 13 percent nor the 15 percent blends would increase the number of refineries needed to produce the product, but it would increase the need for more raw materials.

The other area of concern brought to the attention to the audience was the amount of drainage and soil erosion occurring from Midwest farms.

Northey along with other IDNR officials visited the Gulf of Mexico to look at the effects that fertilizer run-off is having with the problem of hypoxia (water lacking oxygen) from the Mississippi River Basin.

Studies are showing the “dead zone” in the Gulf is being caused by large amounts of hydrogen or nitrogen from fertilizers that may be a large part of what is killing algae. As algae dies, it sinks to the bottom, decomposes, and uses up the oxygen in the water in the area. That lack of oxygen is killing plants and fish in a fluctuating area ranging up to 6,000 square miles, mostly along the coast of Louisiana, west of the mouth of the Mississippi.