02/10/05 Committee vote soon on ethanol bill

The Idaho Dairymen's Association and the Idaho Conservation League say they're going to work together on a permitting process for large dairies. Dairymen's executive director Bob Naerebout says they want to be pro-active. NEAREBOUT "If we have an impact on air quality we need to know what that impact is and then we need to identify the best management practice to reduce that impact." Other than some research from 1938 there is no hard data on air emissions from confined animal feeding operations. That's why dairymen decided that the collaborative research effort, which also involves USDA, EPA and the University of Idaho was worth pursuing. NEARABOUT "If we're going to defend ourselves in court or if we're going to make a difference on the environment we have to have present day research and so they did two things. One, they put the motion in front of the people to change the purpose or add to the purpose of IDEAL that it is also dairy research fund, an environmental dairy research fund and they also assessed themselves another half cent per hundredweight to help fund. That's just kind of like seed money." IDEAL, the Independent Dairy Environmental Action League will get 450 thousand dollars annually from the producer tax to try to jump start some of the various air emission research projects anticipated over the next five to ten years. Today's Idaho Ag News Bill Scott