There was a day long ago when America’s farmers and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) could be put on a pedestal for honesty and ethics. The farmers are still there but USDA has been politicized just as nearly every federal agency has. This has been accomplished through the efforts of their technical staffs appointed by our previous President who make up what we call the deep state. They are liberals or progressives (which should be more appropriately called regressives) if not actually Leftists fighting for socialism.
 
Near the top, our current Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, was well chosen by President Trump to put our agricultural house in order. He has filled the upper echelon of the agency with straight shooters. Below the surface the agency remains jam packed with those promoting the complete fraud that we are in the process of destroying life as we know it through the use of our bountiful fossil fuels. They do this by telling colossal lies about agriculture being severely diminished by rising levels of carbon dioxide. Even though most of us learned in high school science class that carbon dioxide was the gas that kept plants alive just as oxygen keeps us alive.
 
These so called scientists try to turn real science on its head by turning night into day expecting us now to believe that a little extra warmth and a lot more carbon dioxide are supposed to wreak havoc on our food supply. How stupid do they think we are. Well for sure, President Trump remembers his high school science and has stopped the exposure through press releases of fraudulent science to the public. He can not readily get rid of the thousands of members of Obama’s deep leftist state but he can stifle their bull horns intended to scare the public with absurd claims of flawed studies.
 
Here are some of the so called scientific studies reported by politico.com recently, that did not see press releases touting them. What you will see is not poor science but not science at all. The biggest concern by left leaning academics was that evidence of faster growing larger rice grains would be bad for the hundreds of millions of people in the world who depend on rice as a staple of their diet. Their studies showed that each rice grain would have a lower percentage of protein and certain minerals.. We expect that is true as a percentage but not as an actual amount per grain. Clearly the most important ingredient of rice is its calories which sustain that population. They would surely be increased.
 
They report that pollution from farming is “likely to increase’. They report that Prairie grass may contain less protein, an important source of nutrition for cattle as a result of more carbon dioxide and resulting photosynthesis. More weeds are likely on our farms. Well that is true and of course yields of all our crops have increased as a result of increased carbon dioxide. This is why satellites show us that Africa is 24% greener than it was 30 years ago. They also say that a little more warmth may make an environment friendlier to insects. By and large a little more warmth is friendlier to everything living on Earth, like us. And of course they are likely correct that we can see more pollen in the air too.
 
They propose that there might be more run-off from farms with increased CO2 in the air but I suspect that was decided based on their legal use of marijuana now.
 
Forty five studies dealing with climate change were not released as they were all opinions not fact. Two were released because they dealt with facts. Their calculations showed that cattle produce an insignificant amount of greenhouse gas (methane) compared to what exists in our atmosphere, and that removing beef from our diets to eliminate methane from cattle would have a negative impact on overall human diets.
 
Finally before all this data causes your eyes to glaze over realize what we know for sure. Carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere produced by the human population, though on the increase, makes up far less than one percent of the atmospheres heat trapping greenhouse gases and only one ten thousandth of all the molecules in the earths air, (78% is Nitrogen, 21% is oxygen, .9% is Argonne and a few other gases along with carbon dioxide make up the rest
 
In April of 2019 Secretary Perdue, in response to a question from politico.com, regarding the decline of press releases on agriculture climate studies, said the following:
 
“We know ‘that’ research, some has been found in the past to not have been adequately peer-reviewed in a way that created wrong information, and we’re very serious when we say we’re fact-based, data-driven decision makers. That relies on sound replicable science rather than opinion. What I see unfortunately happens many times is that we tried to make policy decisions based on political science rather than on sound science.”
 
We are so lucky to have a sensible new Secretary of Agriculture.

Author

  • Jay Lehr is the author of more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government, as well as many foreign countries. He is a leading authority on groundwater hydrology.