But do you know what would look better here, instead? Fir. Douglas Fir.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food.

The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation's incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.

According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.

Mr. Vilsack, in a little-noticed statement issued with the report earlier this month, said the department's forecasts "have caused considerable concern" among farmers and ranchers.

(italics... all of them, ours)

This is just insanity.

And haven’t we been down this road of “altering” data to “hide the decline” to fit snugly into a political agenda just recently?

The article goes on to say that Vilsack wants his chief economist to work with the EPA to "undertake a review of the assumptions in the FASOM model, to update the model and to develop options on how best to avoid unintended consequences for agriculture that might result from climate change legislation."

Well, we certainly know what some of the intended consequences of agriculture are: abundant and cheap food that will feed this country’s and the world’s growing population. Unfortunately, we are not really concerned with that. Radically altering the business model of our agrigulture sector based upon junk science is apparently trumping starving ourselves.

The dairy industry is already heavily subsidized in order to prop up prices, so we guess this is just the Obama administration’s way of extending a cash for conifers program to the rest of the agriculture industry.

We’re beginning to wonder: are they really that incompetent or do they sit around and make-up the most blatantly retarded crap just to make blogging easy?

P.S. Looking forward to more green on green violence as the ethanol industry clashes with the Cash for Conifers lobby.

Get to know an American hero

In the 1960s, Borlaug turned his attention to South Asia. India and Pakistan were at war and facing unprecedented famine, with deaths forecast in the hundreds of millions. Indian tests of Borlaug's dwarf wheat seeds were promising, and he traveled there at the request of the Indian government to continue his wheat development program. Despite intense difficulties (including planting wheat under artillery flashes), Borlaug's research resulted in India and Pakistan doubling yields between 1962 and 1970. Both countries were self-sufficient in grain by 1974, and the expected tidal wave of famine deaths had been avoided.

Africa was next on Borlaug's agenda, but by the 1980s he started to face intense opposition from Western environmental groups. Despite his record of success in averting starvation, they opposed his 'Green Revolution' scientific methods -- the use of cross breeding, hybridization, inorganic fertilizer -- as 'unnatural.' Some complained the intensive farming techniques he introduced was displacing traditional subsistence farming, as if starvation by native methods were somehow beautiful and noble. Borlaug would later have be blunt words for these critics:

"many [environmental lobbyists] are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Pop’s side of the family shares the same stout but humble Midwest agrarian stock as Norman Bourlag who some estimate saved as many as a billion lives with his work on dwarf wheat, cross-breading and hybridization.

Bourlag passed away this past Saturday at the age of 95.

The ‘Hawk has more here on this true American and world-wide hero.

The next time you read or hear of the devastating effects of America's alleged neo-imperialism or neo-colonialism please keep the memory of Norman Bourlag in your back pocket, won't ya?