Texas Insider Report: FORT WORTH Texas This legislation is a big win for Texas ranchers & landowners" said Joe Parker Jr. a rancher from Byers Texas and the president of the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association (TSCRA) after the U.S. House voted in favor of the Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act
in response to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys (EPA) attempt to regulate agriculture dust at naturally occurring levels.
H.R. 1633 introduced by Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) exempts agriculture dust if state and local authorities have already implemented dust control measures. In areas where there are no state or local dust control measures H.R. 1633 requires the EPA to prove substantial health effects and show how addressing those effects outweigh the economic costs of implementing more stringent regulations.
Regulating agriculture dust without any scientific proof that it is harmful to human health would have had devastating economic impacts on the Texas cattle industry" Parker said.
Although the EPA recently announced that it had no intentions of regulating agriculture dust Parker says this legislation was necessary to keep the EPA accountable in the future. H.R. 1633 puts in law that there must be sound science to back up such harmful and overreaching regulation.
While particulate matter or dust is considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act the EPA considered regulating dust at a level twice as stringent as the current levelputting areas primarily located in rural
parts of the country where dust naturally occurs on the hook for expensive and unnecessary federal regulation.
The potential revision went so far that the new standard could have been below naturally occurring levels of dust in some states making it impossible to meet.
The legislation now heads to the U.S. Senate where it has already received bipartisan support from 26 Senators.
The Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association a 134-year-old trade organization is the largest and oldest livestock association in Texas. TSCRA represents over 15000 beef cattle producers ranching families and businesses who manage approximately 4 million head of cattle on 75.9 million acres of range and pasture land primarily in Texas and Oklahoma.
