Right on Rene, the city dwellers want to move to the country and change the terrain that has been there for a couple hundred years. Someday the manure from farm animals may generate enough methane to heat a small town.

I have had people call me and complain about the cows mooing, can you believe it?  Ya know when the seperate the calves from their mothers they are noisy but......give me a break.

Where are these people originally from that they are suddenly surprised to hear cows mooing? They should try living on RT7!!! I would trade "mooing" for the sound of tractor trailers shifting gears and the kids with their car speakers up to 1000 decibels.

I think the problem is people move to the country thinking it is quiet, peaceful, serene, and nothing but deer and birds.  Then they find out farmers work the fields until midnight with noisy equipment, there are gunshots regularly either for hunting or recreational target, there are four wheelers, snowmobiles, chainsaws, and yes cows mooing and pooping.  Then of course there are those pesky roosters that start bellowing first thing in the morning.  All of this sometimes gets in the way of the idyllic vision people have of living in the country.

People are like the auto industry.....never want to adjust to the environment but ready to make everyone else make them comfortable.......

Quoted Text

     
Farm lobby shoots down cow tax
Cow belches excluded from effort to limit greenhouse gas
BY DINA CAPPIELLO The Associated Press

    WASHINGTON — One contributor to global warming — bigger than coal mines, landfills and sewage treatment plants — is being left out of efforts by the Obama administration and House Democrats to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
    Cow burps.
    Belching from the nation’s 170 million cattle, sheep and pigs produces about one-quarter of the methane released in the U.S. each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That makes the hoofed critters the largest source of the heat-trapping gas.
    In part because of an adept farm lobby campaign that equates government regulation with a cow tax, the gas that farm animals pass is exempt from legislation being considered by Congress to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
    The EPA under President Barack Obama has said it has no plans to regulate the gas, even though the agency recently included methane among six greenhouse gases it believes are endangering human health and welfare.
    The message circulating in Internet chat rooms, the halls of Congress and farm co-ops had America’s farms facing fi nancial ruin if the EPA required them to purchase air-pollution permits like power plants and factories do. The cost of those permits amounted to a cow tax, farm groups argued.
    “It really has taken on a life of its own,” said Rick Krause, a lobbyist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, which coined the term cow tax and spread it to farmers across the country. “This is something that people understand. All that we have to say is that [cows] are the next step with these proposed permit fees. And people are still talking about it.”
    Administration officials and House Democratic leaders have tried to assure farm groups that they have no intention of regulating cows. That effort, however, has done little to ease the concern of farmers and their advocates in Congress about the toll that regulating greenhouse gases will have on agriculture.
    Lawmakers and farm groups are now pressing for the climate legislation to guarantee that farmers will be compensated for taking steps to reduce greenhouse gases. That could lead to farmers getting paid if their cows pass less gas.
    Research has shown that changing cattle diet and boosting efficiency — such as producing the same amount of milk and beef from a smaller herd — can result in less gas, according to Frank M. Mitloehner, an associate professor at the University of California at Davis, who has studied livestock gas for 15 years.
    “I don’t think livestock should be ignored. Every industry has to play their role,” Mitloehner said. But laws designed to reduce emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes won’t work with cattle, which can’t be fitted with pollution control devices, Mitloehner said.
    “The belching is very hard to collect,” he said. “You cannot capture these gases.”
    The climate bill specifically excludes enteric fermentation — the fancy term for the gas created by digestion and expelled largely by burping — from the limit it would place on greenhouse gas emissions. The legislation directs the EPA not to include it among the various sources that could be subject to new performance standards.
    EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has called rumors of the cow tax “ridiculous notions” and a “distraction.” ..............>>>>....................>>>>.............http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar00601

For now...just like they withdrew the half baked crackpot environmentalist scheme to take away exclusive usage from the permit holders on the Sacandaga, and return the shoreline to "natural state." They will gain a few more seats here and there and realize that with the kind of dictatorship they have from top to bottom that anything is possible for the whackies and the extreme greenies.

Quoted Text

     
Diet change makes Vt. cows less burpy
Belch is industry’s biggest greenhouse gas contributor
BY LISA RATHKE The Associated Press

    COVENTRY, Vt. — Vermont dairy farmers Tim Maikshilo and Kristen Dellert, mindful of shrinking their carbon footprint, have changed their cows’ diet to reduce the amount of gas the animals burp — dairy cows’ contribution to global warming.
    Coventry Valley Farm is one of 15 Vermont farms working with Stonyfield Farm Inc., whose yogurt is made with their organic milk, to reduce the cows’ intestinal methane by feeding them flaxseed, alfalfa, and grasses high in Omega 3 fatty acids. The gas cows belch is the dairy industry’s biggest greenhouse gas contributor, research shows, most of it emitted from the front and not the back end of the cow.
    “I just figured a cow was a cow and they were going to do whatever they were going to do in terms of cow things for gas,” said Dellert. “It was pretty shocking to me that just being organic wasn’t enough, actually. I really thought that here we’re organic, we’re doing what we need to do for the planet, we’re doing the stuff for the soil and I really thought that was enough.”
    She learned it wasn’t. The dairy industry contributes about 2 percent to the country’s total greenhouse gas production, said Rick Naczi, a vice president at Dairy Management Inc., which funds research and promotes dairy products. Most of it comes from the cow, the rest from growing feed crops for the cattle to processing and transporting the milk.
    To satisfy consumers’ demands for sustainable production, the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy in Rosemont, Ill., is looking at everything from growing feed crops to trucking milk to reduce the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. That would be the equivalent of removing about 1.25 million cars from U.S. roads every year, said Naczi, who manages the program.
    One way is by feeding cows alfalfa, flax and grasses, all high in Omega 3s, instead of corn or soy, said Nancy Hirschberg, head of Stonyfield’s Greener Cow Project. The feed rebalances the cows’ rumen, the first stomach of ruminants, and cuts down on gas, she said. Another way is to change the bacteria in a cow’s rumen, Naczi said.
    When Stonyfield first analyzed its contribution to global warming in the late 1990s, the company thought its factory in Londonderry, N.H., produced the most greenhouse gases.
    “And when we got the report and our number one impact on climate change was the milk production, we were completely stunned,” she said.
    A study showed that the single biggest source was the cow’s enteric emissions: gas.
    The company funded energy audits on farms and research on small manure digesters so farmers could produce energy from methane gas. ............>>>>..................>>>>..............http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar00800

OMG!!!!!!! what the hell is going on????

Headline should be Farmers cough up more so that cows don't.