Read It Again

90 years ago this week. Connecticut has an egg marketing plan that seems most nearly to fit conditions in northeastern Ohio, members of committees which have been studying ways of getting producers more money from their flocks for six months agreed at their last discussion in Canfield.

50 years ago this week. On June 27, the Nixon Administration announced an immediate embargo on the export of soybeans and cottonseed and their products. The reason given was that this was part of the effort to increase supply of feed grains and bring down the cost of food.

25 years ago this week. A total of 24 counties are covered by a state of emergency declared by Gov. George V. Voinovich for areas affected by a series of severe storms and the resulting floods that began on June 24.

mocracyNow, a left-leaning news organization. The court’s action “ends protections for about half of all wetlands in the contiguous United States, jeopardizing access to safe drinking water for millions.”

In a curious twist, the court’s other four justices agreed that the Sacketts had been right from the start but strongly disagreed with their colleagues’ solution: knee-capping the Clean Water Act by appointing themselves “as the national decisionmaker on environmental policy.” That was Congress’s job and, in fact, it had done that job when it “drafted the CWA.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh went further in his dissent. Writing for his three colleagues, Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, noted that the “court’s new [WOTUS] test is ‘sufficiently novel and vague’ and that it will create precisely the kind of regulatory uncertainty that the majority criticized.”

In short, the split decision only further muddies the law and rural America’s increasingly dirty waters — navigable or unnavigable.

(The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. and Canada. Past columns, supporting documents, and contact information are posted at farmandfoodfile. com. ©2023 ag comm)