The Pal-Item has a good round up of the status of current CAFO legislation in the Indiana legislature today. Of special interest were the comments of Republican Tom Saunders, who co-sponsored one of the bills, on some political push-back he has felt:

Saunders said the bill got 62 votes in the House, so it had bipartisan support, but it’s not easy being a Republican supporting more regulation of agriculture.
“Our Republican caucus has several large hog farmers. Behind closed doors, I’ve taken some heat,” Saunders said. “There’s a lot of lobbying. Those who have been talking to (of the bill) have to keep it up.”

Link.

The article notes that the bill faces stiffer opposition in the Republican controlled senate. Robert Jackman, a state senator from Milroy, told Union County Farm Bureau legislative meeting that the 3 year moratorium was “toast,” and added annual fees were too burdensome. However, IDEM is said to need an additional 1.5 million to hire enough inspectors and run its program. Phil Pflum is still hopeful for a moratorium of some type.

The Pal-Item reports today that Whitewater Valley Ethanol is putting together a $200 million dollar plant in rural Fayette county:

Annual ethanol production for the $200 million project is estimated at 110 million gallons. The plant will employ 55 to 65 people with an average annual wage of $45,000, said Troy Flowers of Whitewater Valley Ethanol. Additional support jobs also would be created in the community.

“This, without a doubt, will be the largest rural economic development project Fayette County has seen,” Flowers said. “It will inject $60 million into their economy year in and year out. It won’t matter if labor gets cheaper in Mexico or China. We’ll be here forever. We want to support local growers.”

Link

The plant will use “millions” of gallons of water per day, and promises to pay a premium for local grain producers’ crops. This is the local result of the US push into ethanol production, reflected by the recent partnership announced with the world’s leading ethanol producer, Brazil.

This push into using corn for fuel flies in the face of the science which informs us that corn is a rather inefficient crop to use as an ethanol source:

To achieve Brazil’s results, the U.S. would have to turn all of its crop-producing acreage over to corn and use all of the corn for ethanol, said Eric Wittenauer, a St. Louis-based energy analyst at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.

Link. (LA Times)

In fact, the only factor that makes corn a viable fuel source at this point is the government subsidies that go into corn production, and a 51 cent per gallon subsidy for ethanol producers. Brazil’s prime source for ethanol is its sugar cane crop, a much more efficient crop for ethanol production. The only thing that permits US corn growers to compete with Brazil’s muscular sugar cane based ethanol industry is the 54 cent per gallon US tariff on Brazilian ethanol.

I cannot find the cite, but at some point in a local debate over an ethanol plant, a farmer questioned the wisdom of burning the last 6 inches of topsoil in the Midwest in our gas tanks - instead of saving it for food production.

Jean Harper sends out a heads up to an upcoming release of an independent documentary film on the explosion of the Richmond downtown district:

The documentary film 1:47 tells the story of one such community – Richmond, Indiana – that would lose that calm and innocence in a single fateful day: Saturday, April 6, 1968. On that day, at 1:47 p.m., a huge double explosion rocked the downtown, leaving forty-one people dead, and hundreds more injured. The documentary film 1:47 tells the story of the explosion in Richmond – how it came to happen and how the city’s ordinary – and extraordinary – residents responded to this disaster.

Check the website here for the release details.

From the sound of it, this will be a nice project to keep this story with us. When I first came to Richmond, I heard about the explosion and dug up the book: Death in a sunny street by Esther Kellner. This work was released soon after the explosion and is long out of print.

UPDATE: Doug Masson pointed out in the comments that Morrison-Reeves Library has this book online as part of their digitized collection, available here. Thanks, Doug.

Representative Phil Pflum attended a meeting in Richmond on Friday to answer questions about action in the Indiana Legislature (or, in the case of the tobacco tax, lack of action. He said this about CAFO’s:

I have an obligation to protect the quality of life for all our citizens. Studies show when one of these (CAFOs) is built, property values within two miles experience a 50 percent drop,” Pflum said. “Is it right, when you’re already there, to have them move right across the road?

That quote is from the report in the Pal-Item today.

Marcia at the Indiana Law Blog points to a story in the Congressional Quarterly with some very disturbing news:

EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson told lawmakers today that his agency is developing a proposal to exempt farms from some reporting requirements under federal toxic waste and right-to-know laws.

The agency is stepping in after Congress has rebuffed efforts to grant farms broad exemptions from environmental rules that cover waste produced on animal feedlots.

The proposed rule, which would be narrower than the languishing bills in Congress, will be released later this year, Johnson told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Environment.

Susan Bodine, head of the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, said the proposal would exempt farms from reporting their air emissions to first-responders and to the federal government’s National Response Center if the pollution reaches a level deemed an emergency.

“The local emergency response committees are telling us they don’t do anything with these reports,” Bodine said in an interview. “They’re not responding to manure emissions.”

Bodine said it would “reduce the burden” on first-responders and eliminate “uncertainty” on the farm industry on its reporting obligations of air emissions.