6
CapitalPress.com
Editorials are written by or
approved by members of the
Capital Press Editorial Board.
Friday, May 13, 2022
All other commentary pieces are
the opinions of the authors but
not necessarily this newspaper.
Opinion
Editor & Publisher
Managing Editor
Joe Beach
Carl Sampson
opinions@capitalpress.com | CapitalPress.com/opinion
Our View
Food Prize winner creates better
understanding of climate change
W
hen Cynthia Rosenz-
weig first started study-
ing climate change in
the 1980s, few people outside the
academic and research communi-
ties had ever heard of it. While the
global climate has always changed,
greenhouse gases emitted by human
activities were accelerating it.
But she took a unique tack in her
studies of the climate. Not only did
she and others want to learn about
climate change’s causes, she also
wanted to know: How will it impact
agriculture?
The answer: It’s complicated. As
regional temperatures and precipi-
tation change, farmers must adapt.
Crops that might have thrived in one
region 100 years ago may no longer
be viable there.
In more than three decades of
putting together the puzzle pieces,
Rosenzweig, a scientist at NASA,
has also found warning signs and,
interestingly, encouragement.
“I refuse to be pessimistic about
climate change,” she told an inter-
viewer from the Small Planet Insti-
tute in 2008. “It is
simultaneously the sig-
nificant environmen-
tal challenge of our
time and future genera-
tions, and it is the issue
that is leading us into
Cynthia
Rosenzweig sustainability.”
Rosenzweig, who
holds a Ph.D. in agronomy, has been
working to understand how agricul-
ture can adapt to a changing climate
— and how it can reduce greenhouse
gases.
“Trees store large amounts of car-
bon above ground, whereas crops
can help to restore carbon to the soil
through practices such as no-till and
cover cropping,” she said in the inter-
view. “...So let’s reward farmers for
storing carbon, because it helps to
reduce soil erosion and to reduce the
effects of climate extremes....”
Devising a system that pays farm-
ers for soil carbon sequestration
would represent a quantum leap in
the right direction, she said in the
interview.
For her work, Rosenzweig
received the World Food Prize last
week. For those who are not famil-
iar with it, in agriculture, the prize
is comparable to the Oscar, Emmy,
Pulitzer and Nobel prizes all in one
package.
The founder of the prize was Nor-
man Borlaugh. He was a 1970 win-
ner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his
work to spark the “Green Revolu-
tion” and dramatically increase the
yields of wheat, corn and other crops
during a time when many critics were
sure the world was overpopulated.
Through her work, Rosenzweig is
helping scientists — and farmers —
understand climate change. While
politicians and others may claim the
sky is falling, farmers must find a
way to feed more than 7 billion peo-
ple on the planet without exacerbat-
ing climate change.
How they can increase food pro-
duction and reduce their carbon foot-
prints are two of many questions
Rosenzweig is helping to answer.
But she goes at it differently. Take
“climate deniers,” for example.
While some people dismiss any cli-
mate change questions out of hand,
she welcomes skeptics.
Our View
In Washington, green energy
threatens sage grouse
W
hen environmental priori-
ties collide, advocates for
wildlife and “green” energy
often find themselves on opposing
sides. But a proposed solar project in
north-central Washington has various
factions within state government argu-
ing opposing positions.
What could be more entertaining
than a clash of environmental titans?
A Span-
ish com-
pany plans to
build a 2,390-
acre solar
farm on Bad-
ger Mountain
in north-cen-
tral Washing-
ton near East
Wenatchee.
That fits with
Gov. Jay Ins-
lee’s climate
priorities.
The governor
has made cli-
mate change
a focus of his
administra-
Greater sage grouse.
tion, and his
policy initia-
tives encourage the construction of
solar farms.
The proposed building site for the
200-megawatt facility is mostly unirri-
gated farmland, and perfect for a solar
facility. The company would lease the
land from private landowners and the
Department of Natural Resources.
But here’s the rub: Badger Mountain
is in Douglas County, the greater sage
grouse’s “last stronghold” in the state,
according to the Washington Depart-
ment of Fish and Wildlife.
“It’s their last stronghold, and it
ain’t much of one,” Michael Ritter,
Fish and Wildlife’s lead on solar and
wind projects, said. “You don’t know
how the disturbance will change the
landscape.”
The department has dug in its heels.
Supported by environmental groups, it
has spotlighted the threat to the greater
sage grouse. The bird is not federally
protected, but Fish and Wildlife lists it
as an endangered state species.
It told the state’s Energy Facility
Site Evaluation Council recently that
no new studies performed by the com-
pany will change its mind.
Meanwhile, the state Attorney Gen-
eral’s Office has been assigned to rep-
resent the environment — all of it.
Counsel for the environment warns
that not building the solar plant could
worsen climate
change.
In effect, the
Attorney General’s
Office is arguing
that to save the sage
grouse from the
impacts of climate
change, sage grouse
in Washington must
be imperiled by the
solar facility. Wash-
ington has to destroy
the sage grouse to
save the sage grouse
— a winning strategy
every time it’s been
Jeanne Stafford/USFWS tried.
Ironically, that
office joined 16 other
Democrat attorneys
general in a lawsuit to block a plan to
ease land-use restrictions that protect
sage grouse that was proposed by the
Trump administration.
Does it matter to the sage grouse for
what purpose they are endangered?
Farmers and ranchers may have little
sympathy for the plight of sage grouse
in Washington. The plucky little bird
has often been used by environmental-
ists to restrict grazing and other farming
operations.
Now, it’s expendable.
Once upon a time it was important
to save farmland, but that was before
certain factions decided it was more
important to build wind turbines and
solar cells in pastures and fields. Now,
the sage grouse may also have to yield
to transient political objectives.
When environmental priorities col-
lide, something has to give.
“I’m a working scientist and there
are always questions, always uncer-
tainties. ... When we learn some-
thing new, that opens up 10 things we
don’t know. So, I welcome questions.
I think it’s important to be honest that
we don’t know everything about cli-
mate change, and that we have to
keep learning,” she said in the inter-
view. “That being said, we certainly
know enough about climate change
to be sure that it is the significant
environmental, planetary issue of our
time, and that we have to deal with it
even though we don’t understand it
completely.”
She also goes beyond research.
Rosenzweig and the Agricultural
Model Intercomparison and Improve-
ment Project she helped start have
been working with farmers around
the world to decrease their car-
bon emissions and better withstand
droughts, among other climate-re-
lated problems.
She is one of those researchers
who have put their knowledge to
work for the benefit of us all.
Packers, allies urge
Congress to do nothing
about broken cattle markets
L
arge beef packers and their
allies are fighting to hold Con-
gress at bay — to prevent any
meaningful reforms to the broken cat-
tle market.
This isn’t a new fight as they’ve
successfully held Congress at bay for
decades. Throughout the 2000s they
blocked legislation to ban packer
ownership of livestock, require mini-
mum purchases in the negotiated cash
market, ban unpriced contracts known
as formula contracts or alternative
marketing arrangements; and seven
years ago, they spurred the repeal of
mandatory country of origin labeling.
In the 2010s, they successfully
blocked the finalization of rules to
implement the Packers and Stock-
yards Act — the act passed in 1921 to
protect independent livestock produc-
ers from unfair, deceptive or unjustly
discriminatory buying practices.
The large beef packers’ political
prowess is now legendary. They’ve
ruled with iron fists over the cat-
tle and beef industries for decades
and ensured the legal and regula-
tory framework within which they
operate continually furthers their
self-interests.
But today’s political landscape is
very different than in the past, largely
because Congress, the executive
branch, and the public now realize
that the self-interests of the largest
beef packers have led to the exploita-
tion of independent cattle producers
on one side of the supply chain and
consumers on the other. Beef short-
ages at the grocery store, super-in-
flated beef prices, and a cattle market
unresponsive to historically favor-
able beef demand and beef exports
reveal that exploitation. Where
before evidence of market failure
was regarded by some as equivo-
cal, today the evidence is undoubtably
definitive.
And yet, the beef packers and
their allies continue to advance the
same tired arguments they used to
bring the cattle and beef industries
to the brink of disaster as they’re
using now to keep it on its destruc-
tive course.
The beef packers’ trade association
argued to Congress that “free market
supply and demand fundamentals are
at work. Let them keep working.” It
contends beef prices are high because
of exceptional beef demand and cat-
tle prices are low because there’s an
oversupply of cattle — more cattle to
be slaughtered than there is packing
capacity to slaughter them.
In chorus, their allied industry pun-
dits are grabbing the microphones.
Land grant universities, long the ben-
eficiaries of beef packer endowments,
are generating new studies using old
data showing the cattle market is
GUEST
VIEW
Bill Bullard
functioning superbly under the law of
supply and demand; and are urging
Congress to do nothing or risk some
nondescript unintended consequence.
The Grassley-Tester bill (Sen-
ate Bill 949) requires packers to pur-
chase at least 50% of their cattle in
the negotiated cash market.
Critics, however, claim an inverse
relationship between increased cash
volume purchases and cattle prices.
S.949 is the beef packers’ kryp-
tonite. They fear it because it throws a
barricade across the packer’s road to
vertical integration — it impedes their
goal of substituting competitive mar-
ket forces with their own corporate
control over the entire supply chain.
Let’s unpack the status-quo
gang’s major arguments. If it’s true
that despite strong beef demand and
increasing exports, cattle prices have
nevertheless remained depressed for
the past seven years because of insuf-
ficient packing capacity, then whose
fault is that? Who owns the shuttered
plants and plants that haven’t been
modernized for years?
We allege in our class-action anti-
trust lawsuit that the Big 4 pack-
ers conspired to depress cattle prices
by agreeing to periodically reduce
slaughter volumes to ensure the
demand for cattle did not exceed the
available supply.
And what of critics’ claim of no
confirming data and an inverse rela-
tionship between cash purchase vol-
umes and cattle prices? Well, findings
in the U.S. Department of Agricul-
ture’s report, “Investigation of Beef
Packers’ Use of Alternative Marketing
Arrangements,” reveal that when the
cash market volume was only about
40%, the packers’ use of alterna-
tive marketing arrangements already
depressed fed cattle prices by as much
as $33.28 per head.
If you’re a cattle producer or a beef
eater, then Congress needs to hear
from you that you want them to take
decisive action to fix the broken cattle
market. If you remain silent, the sta-
tus-quo gang is certain to win again.
Tell Congress to restore competi-
tive market forces in the cattle supply
chain, which it can do by enacting the
mandatory country of origin labeling
bill, S.2716, and the force-the-pack-
ers-to-compete bill, S.949.
Bill Bullard is the CEO of R-CALF
USA, the nation’s largest nonprofit
trade association exclusively repre-
senting the U.S. cattle industry.