Commodity Ag: Changing Climate and Your Bottom Line

This is a forum that takes changing climate seriously without just wringing our hands and walking away. Starting with a cold-facts documentation of how climate  is changing and how it produces severe weather, we play out some choices for farms and farmers. We sketch out strategies for handling climate change and cropping uncertainty. We take up financial hedging with crop insurance, buffering weather extremes with soil conditioning, handling the personal effects of financial stress that comes with crop failures, and exploiting – in a good way – all the resources that are available from the research communities as brokered through NRCS. I have made friends from around the country as we have developed this forum. Farming and climate are different from region to region and we have respected that we do not always do things the same way or have the same choices. And as much as we would like to hide in our respective barns, climate extremes are visiting our fields and making courtesy calls on our bankers. Climate stress – this we have in common. Please register and join in learning more about what is happening around us. Register Here: Open to All – No fee Don

Hydrogen Hubs: What are they?

Just in case you were wondering, there are nine different colors of hydrogen depending on how it is generated. Don’t worry, though, we will talking only about Green Hydrogen. This will make our conversation easier.

Back to complications, though, we will be talking about ammonia as well as hydrogen. This is because ammonia housebreaks hydrogen by making it easier to store and transport. Ammonia also is a very handy feedstock for the fertilizers we use for our crops. The chart below lays other applications that we may get to Thursday. This is important. We are looking to hydrogen hubs not only to provide fuel for long-haul trucks and farm equipment. We also want hydrogen – and ammonia – to fuel economic development in our communities…create jobs, harvest tax revenues.

David Brown, our presenter, knows the green part of hydrogen – he has developed a number of the utility-scale photovoltaic projects in Oregon. His hydrogen hub idea takes his green energy off the grid to replace fossil fuels and, along the way,  provide feedstock for manufacturing.

Join us Thursday.

Don

Nutrient Management. Who pays?

We are asking the dairy industry to reduce its nutrient load on the environment. Who pays? Some of the responsibility does fall back on operators who have consumed their neighbors’ clean air and clean water. Some of this comes with the inevitable change of what we socially define as acceptable. We no longer choose to accept many of the environmental effects of the business of growing our food. We have come to expect that companies pay for their “negative externalities”, in this case air and water pollution, by stopping the pollution and paying for its control What we have also come to accept are stable prices for dairy products, ranging from cheese to milk to ice cream.  We ask dairies to pay for control of air and water pollution without passing the costs on to consumers. The grey here is that some of the operators’ margins are made up from federal programs funded by tax payers. The rest of it, though, comes from relentless efficiency improvements through animal breeding and processing technology. For proof, look to the consolidation of dairies into larger and larger operations. A dairy expands to survive in the face of tight margins. Methane is one of the old-fashioned pollutants that upset us as citizens. It is also a potent greenhouse gas and its role in changing climate is what brings it to our agenda. It is the dairy industry’s management of methane’s effect on our changing climate – not just reducing its nuisance cost –  that may win our applause. The prize is elimination of odor, effluent turned to clean water, methane gas emissions eliminated, and biogas supplanting fossil fuel. But, again, who pays when the offense is GHG emissions? Both the digester and distiller technologies generate revenue sources, but are they enough for operators to adopt the new technologies? We as a society want clean water, sweet air, and reduced methane emission. Are we willing to pay for it? Or, how much of the investment is social, how much private? We as consumers have pretty much decided that we prefer to effect changes on the farm through regulations and tax-funded programs rather than increased prices at the grocery store. One constant in American politics is (relatively) cheap food. We need to decide the balance of what we pay through grocery store prices and what we contribute in taxes. There is another balance, between resource and financial sustainability. Ag, fishing and forestry convert natural resources into the food and fiber we consume. The consumption of natural resources needs to be at level that is sustainable into the future, and the economic returns over time need to be sufficient to sustain the farmers, fishermen, and foresters who supply us with what we want. When society changes its understanding of what natural resource use is sustainable and thereby increases the costs of operations, society bears at least part of the adjustment costs. Just what part is decided through politics, market power, and technological development. Whenever we think we can solve a problem by leaning on our farmers, fishermen, and foresters we need to understand that someone pays. Join us Thursday 21 October at 6:30 pm.: Dan Wood, Executive Director, Washington State Dairy Federation Don

What’s Our Price…for using our Natural Resources

What can Counties Ask For?   Washington State passed CETA (Clean Energy Transformation Act) in 2019 to remove carbon from our power supply. About twenty-five percent of Washington’s future power has to come from something other than coal or natural gas. And the timeline is short. Coal is gone by 2025; natural gas GHG emissions have to be neutralized using offsets by 2030, and gone by 2045. This year’s Climate Commitment Act raises the bar on electrical supply. It creates incentives for shifts to EV’s – electrical vehicles – and pushes building standards to transition to electrical HVAC, removing natural gas. Add in pressure on hydropower from the Lower Snake River due to fish concerns and we have intense demand for wind, solar, geothermal, battery complexes and pumped storage, and even nuclear. Renewable energy comes in the front door as natural gas goes out the back. Renewable energy sources use real estate. Think about wind farms and solar arrays. They also need ready access to the grid. This is where rural Washington comes into play. Rural Washington has affordable real estate with power lines running through it. We have a comparative advantage in renewal energy siting. The challenge is how to lever our natural resource assets to the advantage of our local citizens. Where renewable energy is big business and big companies are invested, how do we bargain a good deal? Mitigation, mostly of natural habitat, is the currency of negotiating renewal energy projects. Are there other values to mitigate? Are there other “prices” for using our natural resources? And what does an open end-run to EFSEC for expedited processing do to our bargaining leverage? Bring your thoughts and questions. David Sauter, Chair of the Klickitat County Commission; Dave McClure, Director, Klickitat Economic Development Authority, Andy Juris, Klickitat County wheat grower and Secretary/Treasurer of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, Mike McArthur, Executive Director, Community Renewable Energy Association (CREA). Don