Rural Farmers Lose Court Challenge - A federal appeals court denied an industry request to order U.S. EPA to reconsider its decision to regulate dust in rural areas, a move that agricultural groups say could stifle farmers unnecessarily.

The American Farm Bureau Federation challenged EPA over its decision to regulate coarse particulate matter -- or dust -- in rural areas, arguing that the agency had failed to show any negative health effects associated with the dust. EPA had considered exempting farming and mining operations, but the agency ultimately decided it could not exclude particular industries.

Farming and agriculture groups said the regulations would hurt their industries, affecting everything from combine dust to feedlot dust and even the dust from gravel roads. But environmentalists argued against the exemption for some industrial sources, saying there was compelling evidence that agricultural dust negatively affected public health and the environment.

"Our producers already carry out stringent dust control measures each and every day," said a cattle industry spokesman. "But the requirements imposed by EPA's rule are simply unnecessary and unattainable. In today's tough economic times, this unwarranted and burdensome government interference could prove to be devastating for America's cattle producers."

Farms Must Control Dust

Baltimore Sun - So while the EPA is planning on destroying the industrial economy by regulating carbon, it's also taking aim at farming.  Apparently there's now a "dust standard" that farming regularly violates.  After all, if you're going to be plowing, planting, and harvesting things that grow in dirt, you're going to be creating dust.  The Baltimore Sun reports:

Under rules imposed in 2006, rural areas would be kept to the same standards as urban areas for what the Environmental Protection Agency calls "coarse particulate matter" in the air. So farmers have to keep dust from leaving their property.  Which is, of course, impossible.

When counties reach "non-attainment" levels, it becomes a state's responsibility to bring the county back into acceptable levels. But how do you stop farming from creating dust?

Once again the EPA is going to regulate the economy, this time the rural farming economy, to meet some impossible standard a bureaucrat pulled out of his. . . . ear.  The EPA is out of control.  Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has no intention of getting it under control.  Rather the opposite.