Janesville Messenger Letter Excerpt:The letter writer is the president of the Rock County Farm Bureau and I bring that up because I don't recall the county's farm bureau standing up against the city of Janesville's plan to convert 9,800 rural acres into private and commercial development.
Our farmers will be faced with making the choice of converting farmland into forests for greenhouse-gas reduction or providing food for this country and the world. This shift in land use will hurt consumers at the grocery store. Food costs could rise by up to an average of $33 billion annually by 2020 and up to $51 billion annually by 2030 as a result of this legislation. -- D.R.
Aside from a couple of real and honest-to-goodness farmers and our local environmentalist, I don't remember groups of farming organizations writing letters to the editor or explaining to the city council how converting farmland into concrete and rooftops would shrink the state's agricultural sector or hurt consumers at the grocery store. Maybe I just happened to have nodded out and missed their speeches, warnings and urgency. And I don't recall state or local farm bureaus showing any support for the land use tax reform in AB 75, a provision designed not only to restore legitimacy and fairness to the state's land-use zoning and tax assessments, but also slow down the conversion of precious farmland into blacktopped development. To the contrary, the Wisconsin Farm Bureau was the driving force opposing the reform saying it will push farmland out of production more quickly.
Perhaps Wisconsin's farm bureaus are really not against converting farmland into anything so long as it's not into forests. After all, who wants to buy a forest? The problem is - is what I've always feared it was - that many (not all) farmers are the developers. They're the ones selling.
So the question is - Are the state's farm bureaus nothing more than front houses for developers?
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