TheFirstFurrow

On January 26th, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality issued one of the final critical permits needed to begin construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP).

Responding to the news, North Carolina Farm Bureau President Larry Wooten said, “North Carolina Farm Bureau and our state’s farmers applaud and thank Governor [Roy] Cooper and his administration for approving the permits that will allow the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to move forward. We believe, and our farmers across the state believe, that natural gas in rural North Carolina is important for advancing our number one industry and certainly it’s important for economic development in rural North Carolina.”

What is the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP)?
Put simply, the ACP will help deliver natural gas to rural North Carolina. The new pipeline will link North Carolina to the abundant natural gas supplies of the Marcellus and Utica shale regions in the northeast. Traveling approximately 600 miles, the pipeline will move up to 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. While most of that supply will used for electricity generation, there is sufficient volume to enable local natural gas distribution companies to expand their system to meet the demands of farmers and help drive rural economic development projects.

Why the ACP is good for Agriculture?
As we have discussed before, rural infrastructure initiatives are critical to the success of our rural economy. This is exactly the intent of the ACP – to boost our rural economy. While boosting our rural economies, the availability of natural gas is a key component to growing the State’s largest industry – Agriculture. This is a win-win situation.

Before the pipeline has even been built, the ACP partners are already meeting with farmers to discuss viable areas to extend natural gas to their farms. Access to natural gas provides farmers lower input costs and less price volatility. It’s also a critical component to siting NEW economic development projects. Currently, North Carolina is served by a single interstate pipeline delivering natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico. Adding additional supply from another region of the country provides diversity and competition, leading to the needed lower costs and price volatility. As the state’s largest general agricultural non-profit, a win for North Carolina’s rural economy and our farmers are great reasons to support this economic development project.

The Bottom Line.
North Carolina’s economic development infrastructure is reliant on a modern energy policy that promotes affordable and reliable energy production and delivery while protecting our farmers, landowners, and natural resources. We look forward to the ACP providing a key component to the infrastructure needed to grow our State’s largest industry and fuel rural economic development.

Read the ACP Factsheet on Agriculture

It’s no secret that farmers nationwide oppose the Obama Administration’s 2015 Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) Rule. As we’ve written here before, the 2015 Rule would significantly expand the area where the federal government has the authority to regulate water. Why? Because under the 2015 Rule many tracts of land would become newly regulated “waters,” even land that is only wet for a couple of hours after it rains.

If implemented, farmers would have to apply for costly federal government permits to engage in even the most basic farming practices on these lands. And there is no guarantee that those permits would be approved. Accordingly, numerous federal lawsuits were filed in 2015, including one brought by American Farm Bureau, in the hopes of stopping the WOTUS Rule.

On Monday, the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) once again waded into the WOTUS Rule waters, issuing an opinion in one of those lawsuits, National Association of Manufacturers v. Department of Defense (NAM). The Court’s decision wasn’t a blockbuster (or a page turner, for that matter). It merely stated that opponents of the Rule had to file their legal challenges in the federal district courts, not the federal appellate courts. That’s the result the opponents of the Rule were hoping for. So, let’s call it a narrow win for farmers and other landowners.

But, ironically, the Court’s decision may be a double-edged sword. To explain why, we’ve got to look back at those 2015 lawsuits we mentioned above.

Remember that, until Monday, opponents of the WOTUS Rule weren’t exactly sure where to file their lawsuits. Should they file in federal district court or federal appellate court? To hedge their bets, multiple lawsuits were filed in both courts. Of the cases filed in federal district court, most were dismissed by federal trial judges who said they didn’t have authority to hear the challenges because the cases should have been—wait for it—filed in the federal appellate courts! But a district court judge in North Dakota said otherwise and blocked the 2015 Rule from taking effect. However, that ruling only applied to 13 states: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Therefore, North Carolina farmers were not protected by the judge’s order.

Meanwhile, the cases filed in the federal appellate courts were consolidated in the Sixth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals. The Sixth Circuit ultimately blocked the Rule from taking effect while it wrestled with the procedural question that SCOTUS answered earlier in the week. Unlike the North Dakota decision, the Sixth Circuit’s order took effect nationwide and it has been in effect since October 2015. As a result, North Carolina farmers haven’t had to comply with the 2015 Rule.

But the nationwide order blocking implementation of the 2015 Rule will go away soon. That’s because, at the end of its Monday opinion, SCOTUS sent the NAM case back to Sixth Circuit, directing it to dismiss the all of the cases challenging the rule. If the Sixth Circuit doesn’t have the power to hear those cases, it can’t continue to block the WOTUS Rule. The process of sending NAM back to the Sixth Circuit will take a little over thirty days. So sometime in late February the national stay that has protected North Carolina farmers from the 2015 Rule will evaporate.

With Congress back in their districts for August Recess, we thought it’d be a good time to talk about some federal issues that are a high priority for Farm Bureau. This week: WOTUS.

So what is WOTUS? Back in 2015 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) adopted a rule defining the scope of “waters of the US” (WOTUS) protected under the Clean Water Act (CWA). That rule, the WOTUS rule, expands federal authority beyond the limits approved by Congress and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But you may be thinking, ‘didn’t courts strike down the WOTUS rule?’ Yes and no. The rule has never been implemented because it was stayed in both federal district court and a federal court of appeals. But those court orders are only temporary. And while the EPA’s current plan is to eliminate the 2015 rule and work on crafting a better WOTUS definition, environmental activists desperately want to preserve the 2015 land grab.

The impact of the 2015 rule on farmers will be enormous. That’s because the rule effectively eliminates any constraints the term “navigable” previously imposed on the Corps’ and EPA’s CWA jurisdiction, and the list of waters deemed “non-navigable” is exceptionally narrow—providing that few, if any waters, would fall outside federal control. This kind of shift in policy means that EPA and the Corps can regulate any or all waters found within a state, no matter how small or seemingly unconnected to a federal interest.

Written by Michelle Lovejoy, Executive Director of the North Carolina Foundation for Soil and Water Conservation

“I saw drought devastation in nine states. I talked with families who had lost their wheat crop, lost their corn crop, lost their livestock, lost the water in their well, lost their garden and come through to the end of the summer without one dollar of cash resources, facing a winter without feed or food — facing a planting season without seed to put in the ground.” – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In this quote, FDR is describing his 1936 trip to the Dust Bowl: a 150,000-square-mile area, including the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and bordering sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico that was struck by what some scientists believe to be the most severe drought in 300 years. The massive problem started when the drought killed crops that kept the soil in place. Then intense winds raised gigantic dust clouds that would completely cover homes, suffocate livestock and caused pneumonia in many children. It was so strong and unyielding that it even blew dust all the way to Washington, D.C.

But how does North Carolina tie into the Dust Bowl?

North Carolina (Wadesboro) is home to the Father of Soil Conservation, Dr. Hugh Hammond Bennett. After accepting a job with the USDA Bureau of Soils in 1903, Bennett went on to spend the next three decades studying soils across the US and abroad, and he became convinced that soil erosion was “the biggest problem confronting the farmers of the Nation over a tremendous part of its agricultural lands.” Soil conservation became his life’s work.

Dr. Bennett was a smart man and a great communicator. He knew that he needed to drive the point home to Congress so they would understand soil erosion as the “National Menace”. The story goes that in 1935, he started tracking a large dust storm traveling from Oklahoma to Washington, D.C. He began his plea to Congress and had a runner staged to bring updates of the storm’s movement. At the pivotal point, he stepped down from the podium and threw open the window. As the soil flew in he said, “Gentlemen, that is Oklahoma,” – and with that, the Soil Conservation Act was passed.

Why did he recommend soil and water conservation districts?

A couple weeks ago we talked about the growing use of drones in agriculture and outlined some of the policies surrounding drone usage. This week, we’d like to turn the spotlight back onto drones and provide some cool facts about how this technology is being used to help farmers improve yields, use inputs more efficiently, and increase profitability.

Print Ready PDF