American Farm Bureau Federation Vice President Scott VanderWal testified to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Wednesday. VanderWal gave testimony in support of the Livestock Regulatory Protection Act of 2021.
‘We wanted to stress to the members of the committee that agriculture has been tremendously innovative over many, many years. And with the subject of greenhouse gas emissions and everything coming up, we want them to understand the tremendous strides we’ve made and improvements, and of course agriculture is always looking to improve. We’ve become much more efficient both from an input standpoint and also from greenhouse gas emissions standpoint per unit of productivity.”
The legislation would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating agriculture based on greenhouse gas emissions.
“Part of the points that we made is the strides that we’ve made have been voluntary and market-based over the years and that needs to continue. We can’t have mandatory generalizations or instructions from the government handed down to us because that causes a tremendous economic and time impact.”
VanderWal adds farmers and ranchers are the original conservationists.
“That’s absolutely right. Farmers and ranchers want to leave their land and the resources in better conditions than they found it and that’s certainly very important because we live on the land, we drink the water that’s under the ground, and we depend on those resources to make our living, and there’s no reason we would ever abuse those. And in fact, we do our best to take care of them at all times.”
