Obama's Farm Team Heads For Rural America: The New Energy Heartland?

Members of the Obama Administration have embarked on a “listening tour” in rural America this summer, but let’s hope the visits involve more than listening.

This is a moment for the administration’s top officials to engage farmers, ranchers and rural residents in a robust exchange of ideas about their role in a new American economy.

That role seems as obvious as it is dynamic.

The “clean energy economy” President Obama advocates can revitalize the nation’s long-neglected rural communities. Many of them can become the epicenters of sustainable energy production in the United States, as well as our principal providers of carbon sequestration services.

In his climate and energy policies, Obama is sowing the seeds for that new era of rural prosperity, but it will be up to rural America to bring in the harvest.

Federal ethanol subsidies seem to be getting all the attention from the farm lobby, but ethanol feedstocks (make that cellulosic) are just one of the new crops that will power America in the years ahead.

In parts of the United States, landowners already are making thousands of dollars a year in lease payments to host wind turbines on their fields. Each turbine occupies a very small footprint, which allows farmers and ranchers to continue cropping or grazing the land. That makes wind a very lucrative crop as well as a source of new property tax revenues for rural communities.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory:

There is a bright spot on the rural economic development horizon: wind. In fact, achieving the goals of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Powering America program during the next 20 years will create $60 billion in capital investment in rural America, provide $1.2 billion in new income for farmers and rural landowners, and create 80,000 new jobs.

Wind energy offers rural landowners a new cash crop.

Although leasing arrangements vary widely, royalties are typically around $2,000 per year for a 750-kilowatt wind turbine or 2 percent to 3 percent of the project’s gross revenues. Given typical wind turbine spacing requirements, a 250-acre farm could increase its annual farm income by $14,000 per year, or more than $55 per acre. In a good year, that same acre might yield $90 worth of corn, $40 worth of wheat, and $5 worth of beef. (Note: This report and its numbers are 5 years old; I’ve heard of lease payments of $5,000 per turbine.)

More than a billion dollars in new income is not loose change. it’s change farmers and rural communities can believe in.

Solar farms can be next, along with locally owned bio-refineries that turn agricultural and urban wastes into fuel and a variety of other consumer products. By harvesting methane gas from animal feedlots and local landfills, farms and rural communities can obtain renewable energy while preventing one of the most potent of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere. (Methane’s heat-trapping properties are more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.)

Tomorrow’s farms will earn new income from dedicated energy crops such as switchgrass and other perennials and from non-food crops that can be turned into a wide variety of products now obtained from petroleum, ranging from cosmetics to road de-icers and biodegradable plastic bags.

In a robust carbon market, farmers will earn additional income by managing their woodlands for carbon sequestration and by using low-carbon tillage methods.

In the meantime, farmers must begin practicing sustainable agriculture to restore and preserve our soils, water and forests. This is an area rich for discussion as Obama’s team makes its rural visits. It means fundamental changes in farm policy, including federal subsidies that encourage crop diversity. It implies much more careful management of fertilizers to keep them out of waterways and much better management of nitrogen, itself a greenhouse gas. It means more efficient irrigation, the use of less-thirsty crops and the preservation of wetlands to help protect water supplies.