AFBF and EWG are bumping heads over emissions legislation introduced
last week in the Senate. The Environmental Working Group backs a bill aimed
at reducing smokestack emissions by 17 percent from such industries as
manufacturing, oil refining and power generation.

American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman said, "For the
future of the U.S. economy and American agriculture, climate change legislation
must be defeated by Congress."

His reasoning is that the cost of meeting the 17 percent goal by 2020 will
result in higher farm input costs for fuel, fertilizer and pesticides.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack agreed that farm costs would increase,
by 0.3 percent between the years 2012 and 2018, but that the higher costs
would be outweighed by farm income generated by a carbon offset program.

And EWG said any cost increase would be negligible, and far less than the
loss of income caused by droughts, floods, higher temperatures and crop losses
resulting from climate change.

There's always news coming out of Washington, isn't there? What would
really be news is if something happened, or somebody had an idea, and
everybody else agreed that it was good.

More details are in a Washington Post story by Reuters reporter Christopher
Doering. You can read it here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/07/AR2009100700074.html

Pennsylvania grape growers are looking for volunteers to help them with a sundance. "It's been a hard, difficult vintage, so far," Mark Chien told Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres. The difficult part has been due mostly to the lack of sunshine, which grapes need to produce sugar. Red grapes have especially suffered for the lack of sunny days. Torres's story is in our current edition.

Squawk box? You call this squawking? http://www.break.com/index/nerdy-kid-shreds-on-the-accordion.html