HENDERSON, Colo.-
Renewable energy will be a big part of the new federal farm bill and Colorado agriculture will likely have a big role in producing that alternative energy, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said Monday.
Harkin, the Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, said he would also look at creating a permanent disaster relief fund in the farm bill for the kind of storms that pounded southeast Colorado in December. An estimated 10,000 cattle died in the blizzards.
Farmers and ranchers from across the state turned out for the hearing, the first on the new farm bill to be held outside of Washington.
“I believe Colorado is going to play a very important role in the production of energy from biomass,” Harkin said in a news conference before the hearing at the Adams County Fairgrounds 20 miles north of Denver.
Harkin and Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., earlier toured the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden where research is under way on converting wood chips, grasses and other plant cellulose into ethanol for fuel for vehicles.
“We’re going to be looking at NREL for a lot of research into this and we’re going to put more money into research on cellulose conversion,” Harkin said.
That was welcome news to Salazar, Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter, Colorado Agriculture Commissioner John Stulp and Rep. Kathleen Curry, D-Gunnison, also at the news conference. Salazar, Ritter and the Democratic-controlled Legislature are pushing for Colorado to become a center of renewable energy research and production.
Bills moving through the Legislature include one that would require some utilities to generate 20 percent of their electricity from renewable energy by 2020.
Ritter and Salazar have said that Colorado farmers and ranchers can play a big part in producing renewable energy on wind farms and biofuels.
“I think we are at a beginning point of a new chapter for agriculture and for rural America,” said Salazar, an Agriculture Committee member. “I think that rural America is hungry for a new chapter of opportunity.”
Ritter and Stulp said several Colorado farmers and ranchers are also struggling just to survive following blizzards in December that stranded thousands of cattle in several feet of snow on the eastern plains. Hay was dropped by Colorado National Guard helicopters and delivered by snowmobiles.
“To make matters worse, the winter blizzards came on the heels of six years of drought in Colorado,” Ritter said. “Many farmers and ranchers are literally facing economic ruin.”
Stulp said other state officials have said the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s system of equating a percentage of crop losses with cattle losses doesn’t work because it doesn’t account for the loss of grazing and hay due to snow and the decline in birth rates because of lingering illnesses.
Members of a panel during the hearing ran down lists of items they would like to see in the new farm bill, expected to be ready for debate by June or July. For Kent Peppler, a Weld County farmer and president of the Rocky Mountain Farmer’s Union, the issue’s simple.
“The No. 1 issue is money,” Peppler said.
Just a baseline budget or worse won’t help stop the exodus of young people leaving family farms and ranches, Peppler said.
A proposal by the Bush administration would cut agriculture spending by $18 billion over the next five years. The current farm bill, approved in 2002, expires at year’s end.
