Coping with the weather is nothing new for farmers, but dealing with climate change requires a different level of adaptation. Consequently, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced Wednesday, the USDA is forming seven Regional Hubs for Risk Adaptation and Mitigation to Climate Change to assist farmers to adapt by providing them science-based data and how to apply it:
"For generations, America's farmers, ranchers and forest landowners have innovated and adapted to challenges. Today, they face a new and more complex threat in the form of a changing and shifting climate, which impacts both our nation's forests and our farmers' bottom lines. ... USDA's Climate Hubs are part of our broad commitment to developing the next generation of climate solutions, so that our agricultural leaders have the modern technologies and tools they need to adapt and succeed in the face of a changing climate." [...]Please read below the fold for more on the USDA's response to climate change.
The Hubs will provide outreach and information to producers on ways to mitigate risks; public education about the risks climate change poses to agriculture, ranchlands and forests; regional climate risk and vulnerability assessments; and centers of climate forecast data and information. They will also link a broad network of partners participating in climate risk adaptation and mitigation, including universities; non-governmental organizations; federal agencies such as the Department of Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Native Nations and organizations; state departments of environment and agriculture; research centers; farm groups and more.
The hubs will be located in Ames, IA; Durham, NH; Raleigh, NC; Fort Collins, CO; El Reno, OK; Corvallis, OR; and Las Cruces, NM, with sub-hubs in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico; Davis, CA; and Houghton, MI. They will be overseen by William Hohenstein, director of USDA's Climate Change Program Office.
First announced last summer, the hubs will be one of several initiatives President Obama is taking as part of his Climate Action Plan. While the impact of the hubs may be small, it's the cumulative effect of such initiatives that the administration views as important.
On the whole, farmers are a conservative lot, and they are deeply suspicious of environmental regulations and government bureaucracies that they see as hampering them. That includes regulatory policies meant to address climate change. One of the key objections has to do with restrictions on carbon emissions. While the generally right-wing American Farm Bureau Federation has taken no stance on the regional hubs, its overall view of Obama's proposed climate change policies is a negative one:
Farm Bureau does not support any actions or policy that federal agencies could adopt, or the utilization of any existing authority, to regulate emissions of GHGs. Farm Bureau does not support the current actions of EPA to regulate GHGs from new or existing power plants as it causes increased costs to produce food, feed, fuel and fiber without measurably addressing the issue of climate. Farm Bureau would especially oppose any regulation of GHGs from agricultural sources.That may not be a direct denial of human-caused climate change, but it's close enough.