While this wasn't a highlighted part of USDA's news release, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack made some strong comments on the climate change legislation at a community forum in Kentucky. Al Cross, a professor at the Institute for Rural Journalism, noted in a summary of the forum that Vilsack said he would push Congress to add carbon credits for agriculture and forestry to the climate bill now moving through the House, and to give his department authority to oversee those segments of the proposed "cap and trade" system, rather than the Environmental Protection Agency.

"We will be advocating forcefully" for both provisions, Cross quotes Vilsack as saying. Vilsack also said he agreed with House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., that calculations of the carbon footprint of ethanol should not include "indirect land use," such as the conversion of forest land to agriculture when expansion of corn acreage for ethanol pushes production of other crops elsewhere, including other countries.

That position is not in agreement with a recent finding by EPA, but Vilsack told reporters that EPA's proposal is still "subject to peer review," and he is confident that a final rule on the topic will find him and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in agreement. Peterson said he and at least 26 other rural Democrats will oppose the Waxman-Markey climate bill unless EPA's position on indirect land use is not changed.

Separately, a study published Thursday in Science magazine seems to back the argument that adding agriculture and forestry to a climate scheme would be a better strategy. The study examines the potential of integrating forestry and agriculture into carbon emissions mitigation schemes. The study cites that doing so would "lower the cost of meeting environmental goals" but at the same time also "carries with it profound and largely unappreciated implications for agriculture." According to the study, forestry around the world could increase, but food crops and livestock prices would rise. Also, future improvements in crop productivity "would affect land-use change emissions, making the technology for growing crops potentially important for limiting atmospheric (carbon dioxide) concentrations."

The report also states that the "assumed rate of improvement in crop productivity has a strong influence on land-use change emissions and, correspondingly, on the cost of mitigating climate change."

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