Recommendations and Solutions to Combat Negative Impacts of ESG on American Farmers

we've been talking with Ray from the Becky Institute about the fact that farmers costs will go up 32% they've got all the data they support it in their in their new paper that's out uh if we adopt all of these new rules that the Biden Administration is pushing and the family's grocery bills will go up $1,300 a year on top of all the other inflation that we're already seeing so here's my question do we need these Draconian climate policies is that what we have to do to save the planet or maybe this is just bureaucracy run a muck no I think it's bureaucracy M run a mck because if you take a look at our emissions they are going down while the econom is growing and so our current solution is working we're seeing people voluntarily making choices that they want to do to protect the environment you know and Farmers consider themselves a lot of time stewards of the earth so they want to adopt practices that takes akes care of the land because if they make their land less productive they harm their land that means they're going to produce fewer uh crops the following year and they're going to be hurting their own income so farmers have every incentive to take care of the soil to take care of the water and make sure that we have good air yeah there's no question and I think that the climate science is not settled despite what we've been told you know and there's a lot of flaws in the data for example the heat island effect and so many other things that are we War or we not warming but they're just cramming it down our throats even when the data doesn't seem to support it but one thing that I think is settled if you make it harder for Farmers to produce food prices will go up if you take away fertilizer you'll have lower yields in your crops those things just seem obvious and true yes absolutely and Kevin those are the direct costs and I know you've done a great job pointing out the harms of the ESG movement and I think one of the things we talk about in the report is how ESG is impacting the way farmers can get access to bank loans get access to credit that's kind of the indirect approach because now farmers are having to report what their emission standards are right and so when farmers are getting a bad ESG score under some of these rules that means they're not going to be able to replace farm equipment that means they're not going to have access to to seeds that's one of the reasons you'll see in the report beef prices cost more than other types of grain crops because these lower ESG scores are going to impact the farmers ability to do their job to be able to harvest to be able to take care of their animals and that I think is a pernicious Innovation we've seen coming out of government that's been affecting everything from retirement portfolios to investment Decisions by state politicians and now we're seeing it's going to impact how we score farmers and how they're doing you could actually describe this as an economic War by government and World governments on the farmer and Farms absolutely I mean in the American agriculture is still an important part of the American economy we export hundreds of billions of dollars of farm Goods around the world and I think you know higher prices here in the United States is alarming but just as alarming as what I think is going to happen to countries that don't have as strong as a rich agriculture sector are we going to see more countries like Sri Lanka that are going to be struggle to feed their family because they're not going to be able to have the food much less be able to pay for it yeah and the irony of all this is that will be worse for the environment people may uh we need to have more children we need to burn coal we need to do all sorts of things to respond so the the environmental effect is likely to be negative uh at the same time that we hurt people so there are seven different uh recommendations that I pulled one of them is withdraw from the Paris climate ards I think that's pretty obvious uh two revoke as much of the Ira's Net Zero funding and tax credits as possible explain that one sure you know when uh the B Administration passed you know there so-called a poorly named inflation red reduction act they knew that this was going to have a big impact on Farmers so they threw $43 billion doar of subsidies into the Department of Agriculture to try to entice Farmers you know to be able to adopt these policies you know I think a lot about you you know Ronald Reagan you know when government sees that great quote you know when government sees something you know taxes if it doesn't work regulate it and then if you kill it then subsidize it that's a lot of what's going on right now is you're jacking up prices on agriculture so you're trying to throw government subsidies we know the end result is higher inflation again higher prices on American families higher taxes to pay for it we should get rid of those subsidies we don't need to move forward in that direction let the market work save taxpayers money and have the federal government stop spending yeah no and what you're talking about is if we don't do that we'll have socialized Farms big farm big corporations and the government owning everything okay number three this is obvious Congress must build bipartisan anti-g Coalition I believe in that uh then you said Pro number four proactive and targeted ESG banss we're totally in agreement with that uh number five pass laws preventing ideological ESG investment and lending we've talked about that a little bit number six corporate and shareholder response to ESG metrics explain this one yeah so you know what we're looking at right now is that there's a great quote that came out that basically said cows are the new coal from an ESG fund manager right and so basically saying we're going to look and evaluate cows and score them has been poorly as we did Cole a few years ago so there's a lot of concern I think of the lens that a lot of these companies are looking at where they're tipping the scale against certain types of farmer prices and really endangering what I think is a staple of the American economy and the food that we eat number seven promote good affordable farming practices at the local level describe that one yeah well you know Farmers right now are always willing to be Innovative and the crops that they grow and so we want to make sure is that there's incentives in place that farmers know for example if they want to go to not till for example a slightly more organic less impact on their land they know how to do that Ed education is a better policy than Governor mandates and we believe that Farms are kind of the heartland of communities and so farming practices that work best in Ohio may not work as well in Southwest Texas and so we need to make sure that standards are adopted state-by-state Community instead of this National one-size fits-all where everybody is simply not an Iowa or Nebraska corn farm [Music]