'Cow Tax' Would Further Cripple Small Farms

The Supreme Court last year ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate the gaseous emissions from farm animals and from manure if it finds that those emissions are toxic. This has led to proposals for taxes on agriculture, on a per animal basis, and for control of animal wastes in ways that remove offending gases from the atmosphere. Such proposals, even with a break-in threshold for the regulations, such as twenty-five dairy cows, will further cripple small farming. And on the revival of small farming depends the preservation and, hopefully, the renaissance of rural American life. Such EPA regulations would continue and strengthen the USDA policy, in effect since the 1940s, to destroy small farming in favor of large corporate farms.